Good morning and welcome to BrightSphere's conference call to discuss our results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2024. Before we get started, please note that we may make forward-looking statements about our business and financial performance. Each forward-looking statement is subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in our SEC filings, including the Form 8-K filed today containing the earnings release and our 2023 Form 10-K. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them as a result of new information or future events. We may also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information about any non-GAAP measures referenced, including a reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures, can be found on our website, along with the slides that we will use as part of today's discussion. Finally, nothing herein shall be deemed to be an offer or solicitation to buy any investment products. Suren Rana, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will lead the call, and now I'm pleased to turn the call over to Suren. Thank you, Melody. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. As usual, I'll cover some of the main highlights on Slide five of the deck in my initial remarks, and then we can jump to Q&A. For the first quarter of 2024, we reported ENI per share of $0.44 compared to $0.28 in the first quarter of 2023 and $0.77 in the fourth quarter of 2023. The 57% increase in ENI per share compared to the year-ago quarter was primarily driven by increasing management fee revenue due to higher AUM from the market appreciation that we saw over the last 12 months. Our AUM is now $110 billion, 6.5% higher than what we had at the end of 2023. Our EPS also benefited from the share buybacks that we started in December 2023, and we have now bought back approximately 10% of our outstanding shares. Our ENI increase versus year-ago quarter was 48% compared to the 57% increase in EPS that I mentioned earlier. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, the ENI and EPS are lower, and that decline was driven by seasonality and timing of performance fee, as the majority of our performance fee is typically earned in the fourth quarter. Acadian's investment performance remains strong. As of March 31, 2024, 83%, 91%, and 93% of Acadian's strategies by revenue outperformed the respective benchmarks across three, five, and 10-year periods. Net client cash flows for the quarter were $0.4 billion, as outflows from managed volatility and some other strategies were offset by inflows in other areas. Our growth initiatives are continuing to progress on plan. Acadian's equity alternatives platform, seeded in Q4 of 2022, continues to build a strong track record of outperformance. Acadian's systematic credit platform's first strategy, U.S. High-yield strategy, that was seeded in November 2023, has also started building a good track record. In April of 2024, we also seeded the credit platform's second strategy, global high-yield strategy, with another $15 million of seed capital, and that strategy will now start to build a track record. Turning to capital management, we repurchased 3.5 million shares, approximately 9% of our outstanding shares in the first quarter of 2024, for approximately $74 million. We had a cash balance of $102 million as of March 31, 2024. During the first quarter of 2024, Acadian drew down on the revolving credit facility and ended the quarter with an outstanding amount of $73 million on the facility. As we've discussed in prior years, this revolving facility is at the Acadian operating level and is repaid from cash from operations at Acadian, not from our corporate cash balance. Acadian draws on this facility at the beginning of the year for first-quarter seasonal needs, mainly to pay prior year's annual bonuses, and the facility is then paid down fully by year-end from the cash generated from the operations. We expect this year to be no different. I'd like to close my initial remarks with reiterating that we remain focused on maximizing shareholder value and will continue using our free cash flow to support organic growth and to buy back our shares. I'll now turn the call back to the operator, and I'm happy to answer questions at this point. question, participants should lift their phone receiver and press star followed by the number one on their telephone keypad. To cancel a question, please press star one again. Please hold for a brief moment while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Glenn Schorr from Evercore. Please go ahead. The question from Glenn Schorr? Your line is now open. Operator, perhaps you could move to the next question and we could circle back with Glenn later. Your next question comes from the line of Michael Cyprys. Please go ahead. Just curious, any additional color you can give on cash usage and how we should think about it in the year ahead. What's the minimum level of cash that you feel like you can run with, and also how should we think about use of excess capital? Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Like I said, we have about $100, a little more than $100 million currently at the end of March, and we are mostly almost pretty close done with the $100 million authorization we had previously. We have about $15 million left on the authorization. So I guess if you just go through the $100 million, yeah, we think about $25 million of operating cash that we'd like to keep as a minimum. There's the $15 million left on the buybacks, so that's $40 million. I mentioned earlier that we seeded $15 million for our second strategy on our credit platform for the global high-yield strategy, so that's another $15 million, that's $55 million. So I think, yeah, we're left with about $40 million or so from a use perspective, and we'll look to buybacks. We also would look to seed some more products on the systematic credit platform. We would target fourth quarter to seed our investment-grade strategies, both U.S. and global strategies, but we'll also generate more cash in the interim and would try to recycle some existing seed as well. In general, I guess those are the round numbers, and we add more cash, but it will be used for buybacks and seeding purposes. Great. Thanks so much. Maybe as a follow-up, just curious your thoughts on pursuing something more programmatic in terms of buybacks rather than opportunistic? Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, currently, we are leaning in favor of opportunistic, the reason being that gives us more flexibility in the timing of seeding as well and also to benefit from the movements in the market. It's not a large amount now that would necessitate anything programmatic, so we'll feel comfortable with the opportunistic approach for now. Great. Thanks so much. Your next question comes from the line of John Dunn from Evercore. Please go ahead. Thank you. Could you maybe talk about some of the other strategic areas that are inflowing that are blunting the outflows from managed volatility? And then separately, what type of environment do we need to get to where we could see less of a drag from managed volatility? Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah, we are seeing good sales across most of our strategies outside of managed volatility, and I would say there's a little bit of slowdown on the emerging markets strategy as well, given that those markets the index itself hasn't done very well in recent years compared to the U.S. markets. But we saw good sales in global equity strategy, in ACWI non-U.S. strategies, and different types of niche strategies such as small-cap strategies. We're also seeing demand from a variety of strategies such as extension strategies where we go a little bit long and short 130/30 strategies, and we have enhanced versions where they go close to the benchmark with a smaller tracking error, and then there's some ESG as well. So it's a pretty good cross-section of strategies where we see sales and where we see pipeline building up, and then we are seeing the outflows from managed volatility and a little slowdown in emerging markets. I guess an environment to the last part of your question. On the environment, managed volatility does well when beta is not running up too much, I guess when there's more of a fair risk-return environment, and it does well over longer periods in the sense that the academic studies and statistics would tell you that over longer periods, 10-year, 15-year periods, the low-beta securities do just as well as high beta, if not better, and that generally holds out to be true. But in the interim, whenever there's a risk-on environment, beta, of course, gets rewarded. So I guess in a more of a risk-off environment or more regular environment over longer periods, those strategies do well. But we haven't had that in a while. Over the last several years, maybe almost 10 years now, it's been a beta-rewarding market, so that's not been an ideal environment for managed volatility. Got it. And then could you give us kind of a characterization of the institutional pipeline, where things are in it as far as early or late? And then anything chunky on the institutional side you have line of sight that might be redeeming in the next couple quarters? Yeah, the pipeline is good in line with what I described, that it's a good cross-section that we'd like to see across different types of strategies, managed volatility being notably absent. Emerging markets is less than where we would like. The investment performance is stellar in emerging markets, but the client interest is a little bit less right now because for several years, the emerging market indexes lagged, U.S. in particular, but also developed markets in the West. But otherwise, other than that, it's a pretty good cross-section and across stages as well, early stage, mid-stage, and late stages that are yet to be funded. But yeah, you said it right that there are on the outflow side, we have pressure from managed volatility, and there are always episodic things that happen with clients reallocating to other things. One thing that we've seen with the high-rate environment is a continued trend of de-risking, particularly by pension plans, where the interest rates now are high enough that they can de-risk from equities and allocate more to fixed income. So those allocation decisions happen from time to time. We're seeing that, and people move from one strategy to the other from time to time. So it's a little bit hard to tell, but I guess from a trend perspective, the de-risking and allocation to fixed income, we see that more often. So when we sort of look at all of that, we expect to be probably flattish over the next few quarters, but any given quarter, we may see more of these things happening coincidentally in one quarter where we may not come out flat. But these are the trends, and that's specifically why we're excited about our fixed income, the systematic credit initiative, because then we can also be a beneficiary of the de-risking trend that we see. Thank you. As a reminder, please press star one on your telephone keypad to ask a question. The next question comes from the line of Kenneth Lee of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Wonder if you could share some thoughts around potential EBITDA generation going forward and perhaps provide any color around your expense outlook and whether you could see some benefit from operating leverage as markets potentially continue to appreciate? Thanks. I can. Yeah, that's a good question. If you look at essentially this quarter versus the year-ago quarter, we saw the benefit of the operating leverage in the sense the markets appreciated compared to the year-ago quarter. The AUM is up by about 12%, and as a result, the management fee was up by about that much, about 12%-13%. But on the ENI level, the ENI is up 48% versus year ago. Then we juiced it a little bit more with our buybacks, so then the EPS is up 57%. So that's primarily because of the benefit of the operating leverage and continued expense discipline. So as we sort of go forward, I guess the markets continue to appreciate. We should see that benefit with the revenue going up, and we're generally trying to hold, be disciplined on the expenses. Over the last few years, we invested a lot in making our infrastructure more scalable. We had some initiatives on outsourcing that provides us more scalability without having to add a lot more to the cost. We dealt with the pressures from inflation, particularly on the data costs and IT costs. That should be abating now. And we built up on these new initiatives that are more or less at full run right now. So we see a much less increase on the operating expenses going forward, being that we invested in scalability in the past few years. So if the markets go up, we should see the benefit of operating leverage. Does that answer your question, Ken? Great. Yep, it sure does. Very helpful there, and that's all I had. Thanks again. Thank you. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference call back over to Suren Rana. Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. We'll look forward to engaging with you in the coming months and quarters.