Hi, everybody. Welcome. I'm Ben Budish from Barclays. I cover the brokers, asset managers, and exchanges sector. Thanks so much for joining us at our Americas Select Franchise Conference this year. Excited to kick it off with Allison Dukes, CFO Invesco. Allison, welcome. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Maybe to kick it off, you know, over the last couple of years, investors have had to deal with a really volatile macro environment, resulting in more challenging flows kind of for the industry in general. You guys reported a return to positive organic growth in the first quarter. Maybe to start out, you know, how do you see investors responding to the current environment, kind of as we see it today, and maybe just kind of recycling back to the quarter, you know, what drove the improvement that you saw? Yeah. It's a tricky environment. Investors are, I think, struggling in general to develop any conviction around the path of the Fed and the path of inflation. Feels maybe a little bit better after last week, perhaps, starting to get a little bit more clarity from the Fed, but certainly that has been of an impact over the last year plus, and certainly impacted this kinda risk-off environment that we've been in. Despite that, we did see a return to inflows in the first quarter. That was largely driven by our institutional channel in particular. Was very pleased to see a few sizable mandates that funded in the first quarter. Notably, there were some, there was an equity component to that as well, which was good to see and some encouraging but early signs from a flows perspective on the institutional channel. We also saw good, strong growth in the ETF solution as well. ETFs have been a strong point for us. I think we've been in inflows in ETFs for nine of the last 10 quarters, and in the institutional channel, we've been in inflows for, I'm gonna lose track, but a few years now. Again, I think those are the real strengths in our capability set overall. Against that backdrop, though, we continue to see some challenges. I mean, overall, active equities continue to be challenged. We are seeing some improvement in redemptions there, but certainly not where we want it to be yet. China continues to be slower growth, a slower recovery than we would have hoped. It was an outflow quarter. We can talk about that as well, but that was a real challenging quarter for us as far as China goes. Well, you mentioned ETFs. It's your largest business with over $500 billion of AUM. As you mentioned, it's been pretty positive flows over the last few years. Maybe talk a little bit about the product suite, the Qs, the smart beta, your targeted ETFs. You know, how do you kind of view Invesco's differentiation? Yeah. We do have a differentiated capability set with our ETF platform. We do not participate as much on the bulk beta side. We are the fourth-largest ETF provider. Our market share is, you know, roughly speaking, around, I'll say 3%, but our revenue share is something north of 7%. We do compete in a differentiated spot. We do have a higher revenue set of capabilities, higher fee capabilities. When you exclude the Qs, over 90% of our ETFs have fee rates that are, you know, on average 30 basis points. That is an attractive place to compete. We have developed strategies that are hard to replicate. When you think about our S&P Low Vol solution, the equal weight, several of the solutions there that are very attractive. Our ETFs in EMEA are a little more commodity-focused, where there's been a lot of interest on the commodity side there. We do feel like we have a differentiated set of solutions. We are taking market share. It's slow quarter by quarter, and of course, we're a distant fourth competitor, but becoming more and more relevant, more and more meaningful. And as you noted, we are north of $500 billion when you look at the ETF suite overall. I'd also mention our Innovation Suite, so really building off the success of the QQQ, which is not a revenue-generating ETF, but rather we receive a marketing support fee in that one. That has allowed us to really create a set of advertising that has really helped draw awareness to Invesco overall, has really helped build the brand of Invesco along with the QQQ. Off the back of that, we've launched our Innovation Suite. That was launched in the fall of 2020, so about two and a half years ago, and I think it's north of $8 billion today, including the QQQM. Those are fee-generating ETFs, so a little bit different than the traditional QQQ. Great. You know, I think you recently sort of shared some thoughts on the growth of the ETF business, sort of in general over the next couple of years. I think you said you think it'll outpace the overall asset management industry by more than double. What are the key drivers here? Is it simply active to passive? What other sort of, you know, high-level trends do you see for the ETF industry? You know, it's a very popular wrapper in the U.S. in particular. It's just got liquidity and dividend characteristics, I think, and tax characteristics that are quite attractive for investors in the U.S.. And we do see the demand continuing to be very strong for that wrapper. At the same time, we see markets that aren't there yet, and we think that there is a real future for their increased demand. And Europe in particular, I noted on the commodity side, but there's still a lot of room. I mean, there's still a strong preference for active and for mutual funds in Europe, but we think there's an opportunity to further expand demand for the ETF wrapper in the future. And then in China, ETFs just are not passive in particular. It's just not really a solution that has been adopted yet. That is still very much an active market. There's a lot of alpha that can be generated still, in China, where the market is still relatively speaking, immature, relative to the U.S.. We think there's a tremendous opportunity, a little bit further down the road in places like China. Maybe sort of the last question on the ETF business. You know, you mentioned, I think, that your products tend not to be commoditized. As this sort of grows for Invesco, what do you see as sort of the mixed impact on your overall fee rates? How should investors sort of think through that? Sure. You know, if you think about the fee rate, again, the fact that when you exclude the QQQ, you really see a fee rate that, let's call it on average, is around 30 basis points. You think about where our mix has continued to shift over the last few years as demand for active has just not been as strong as demand for passive. I would say, you know, the impact of the fee rate overall should be rather negligible. We're not quite as focused on what does passive do to our fee rates, 'cause in a lot of ways, I'd say we've seen a lot of that migration. It's really about what it can do for us from a revenue perspective, from an operating income and a margin perspective, and the operating leverage we can create as we continue to grow scale in the ETF platform. I think we're, you know, just getting into the zone where we'd say we're starting to perhaps see the benefits of scale. We're very focused on continuing to grow that capability and really garnering the benefits of scale. Great. Well, let's move over to fixed income now. We've been entering a period of rising rates and higher yields for some time now. Demand for fixed income has generally been pretty strong. What are you guys seeing in terms of demand, particularly for active fixed income products? You know, what are the key areas where demand has picked up? Yeah. We, you know, we hope and we think that as the impact of inflation starts to moderate, and there's, again, a little more conviction around the path of central banks, that this should be a strong year and a strong environment for fixed income. When I say year, I mean the next 12 months. I'm not sure exactly how calendar year 2023's, you know, going to unfold yet as we're almost halfway through it. You know, I think this should actually, as I said, be, you know, an interesting year for fixed income investors. We think we've got the breadth of capabilities and solutions, we know we do, across the spectrum that really should satisfy a variety of client needs. I would say municipals are an area right now that look particularly strong and interesting as high net worth investors are tax-aware and tax-conscious. That, we think our capability set plays well for that set of needs. I'd point to high yield fixed income as well as an area of real interest right now. I mean, really the breadth of solutions. Interestingly, again, here in Europe, we see real demand for U.S. Treasury funds. That demand has been picking up and there's a lot of interest across the board. Tough year for fixed income in 2022. We do think we're pretty well-positioned to see a better year in 2023 and certainly into 2024. Great. I wanna spend a little time a little later kind of digging into the China business. Just while we're talking about fixed income, I think on the recent quarter, you noticed that there were some, you know, outflows in fixed income in, you know, across your Chinese business, despite kind of higher rates in the area. Kind of the opposite trend that's sort of playing out elsewhere. What are the dynamics in China that, you know, drove this sort of behavior? Yeah. You know, in the fourth quarter, when they started to reopen China, you saw a real spike in yields and of course, the offsetting, lowering of prices. In that, you really saw redemptions pick up. It's a client base, it's an investor base that values more of a stable NAV. When prices started to decline, you saw a real spike in redemptions, and that caused an industry-wide spike in redemptions, and that led to outflows overall. Towards the end of the fourth quarter, we started to see that pick up, and it really persisted through most of the first quarter. It started to improve or at least, abate a bit over the course of the first quarter. We're still not seeing demand overall, just for active products in general return in China, not to the level we would have expected, particularly given the fact that the economy is open, the economy is recovering. You're starting to see consumption patterns maybe normalize a bit. Demand for risk assets has still been muted relative to what we would expect. It did start with this kind of interesting reopening and the reaction to the decline in prices overall. Interesting. Maybe moving over to active equities. You know, it's been a generally pretty challenging environment, especially with public equity indices selling off in 2022, although we've seen a bit of a pickup this year. You know, I think you reported a moderation on active equity outflows in Q1. You know, what's sort of the driver there? Where are you seeing the strongest pockets of demand? What do you think it takes to get the segment back to organic growth? Is it sort of, you know, something internal you can control? Is it sort of dependent on the broader macro and just appetite for that sort of, you know, asset class? Yeah. We definitely saw an improvement in redemptions in the first quarter. In the fourth quarter, in our global equity franchise in particular, we saw outflows of $6.5 billion. In the first quarter, that had improved to outflows of a little over $2 billion, and that includes our Developing Markets Fund. Still really challenging outflows, but significantly reduced outflows from what we saw in the fourth quarter. You know, sales actually continue to be strong. It's redemptions that have driven a lot of the outflows. What's gonna change that, what's going to continue to improve it is investment performance. We have seen a real improvement in our investment performance in the Developing Markets Fund in particular. I think we're back to top quartile on a one-year basis, and that has continued to improve. Gonna take a little while for the three and the five to catch up, but we have seen that inflection point, and I think we're very encouraged by what we're seeing there, and I think that's going to certainly help with the reduction in redemptions. Again, we're seeing that on a pretty ongoing basis. That, without question, that particular strategy overall was the most damaging impact last year. Not surprisingly, developing markets was not an asset class that investors were particularly interested in last year. As investor demand returns to that particular strategy and as our investment performance improves, we think we should continue to see some pickup. You know, overall, we're focused on investment performance. Demand for active equities is challenged relative to other strategies. We know we've gotta be, among the best in investment performance in order to garner, the flows that we're looking for there, and we're highly focused on that. Private markets business. One of your smaller segments, but still over $100 billion of AUM and one of your fastest-growing. Could you maybe provide, like, a brief overview of this business? What are the key exposures, your primary growth drivers, sort of the sub-segments within private markets that can really mean a lot of things? Sure. The two biggest components of private markets for us as it's direct real estate, which is about $73 billion, and credit, which is about $37 billion. On the direct real estate side, that's a business we've been in for many, many decades, primarily an institutional business, although we are focused on continuing to grow our retail capabilities there. We have a well-developed business across both North America, Europe, as well as Asia Pacific, and people on the ground in all three areas. That is an area that has continued to perform quite well for us, and continues to grow. On the credit side, that $37 billion is largely comprised of our bank loan business. I mean, it's almost entirely that, with the exception of about $1 billion in distressed and $1 billion in direct. Those are some newer strategies that we are continuing to grow and build on the back of the success of our bank loan business. We're really private equity and the like is negligible for us. The private markets focus for us is largely real estate and credit. On the credit side, can you just talk a little bit about fixed versus floating? It seems from, you know, the pure traditional or alternative asset managers, there's ton of demand for floating rate private debt. What does your mix look like there? Well, the bank loan business would largely be floating. Since that's the vast majority of our credit business, you know, again, it's gonna be primarily a floating exposure there. I would say on the distressed, on the direct side, a bit of a mix, rather small overall. You know, I think if you had to think about it would be largely be floating right now. Got it. What about in the real estate business? You know, there's a, sort of a broad industry concern about commercial real estate office in particular. You know, I think you called out that the direct real estate portfolio is about a third of your AUM. How do you think about sort of the near term risk, in terms of general office softness, perhaps refinancing risk in terms of, you know, properties that may need to be financed in the next few years? I think that stat was of our direct real estate exposure, about a third is actually office. That's down from what was more like 45% at the beginning of COVID. At the beginning of 2020, our portfolio would've looked more like a 45% exposure to office. We have been working that down over the last few years. That's down to about a third. If you actually broke it out across the continents, it would be, you know, a lower percentage in North America and a slightly higher percentage in Europe and in Asia, where the office environment just isn't as challenged as it is in the U.S.. We feel pretty good actually about our office exposure at the moment. It is a challenging environment in the U.S.. We have been very focused on repositioning that portfolio over the last few years into places like multifamily and industrial and some of the specialty areas like medical office and cold storage. Those have been attractive sectors to be in. Our loan to value is about 30%, so pretty low loan to value overall on the portfolio. You know, well-managed, well-diversified, we think in a good spot given some of the stress we would expect to see right now. Great. Sticking with the real estate theme, can you talk a little bit about INREIT, your non-traded REIT? It's become a very hot topic in the last year with some of the stresses in some of the, you know, large competitor products. You know, what's the demand like? You know, can you talk about your distribution? You know, how are you rolling this product out to the wires? Just kind of an overview of what it looks like. Sure. INREIT was launched, coming up on almost two years ago now, I think it was. And it's right at about $1.1 billion, so it's still relatively small. You know, the timeframe in which we came to market with it, probably a little bit challenged relative to some of the better-known competitors that are out there. And then certainly challenged relative to some of the dynamics impacting those competitors over the last six months. That said, it's been a good performing strategy overall, and we are working closely with some of the wirehouses, and we think very close to actually having it on the platform. You know, I think given some of the challenges and the concentration of exposures that they've seen, there is some need to diversify their own product offering on behalf of their retail clients. We know our strategy is really well positioned to capture some of that demand. We're not as well known in the retail channel. That has largely been an institutional business, and a very successful institutional business, and one where we're well known on the institutional side. Trying to transition that into the retail side and really work through our distribution channels there. It's been a learning opportunity, and one that I actually think is going to serve us well as we continue to think about how do we bring private markets capabilities to the retail channel. Great. All right, let's pivot a little bit. I wanna spend some time talking about your China business. Invesco Great Wall, maybe just high level, you know, can you talk about the strategy? How is it differentiated from your peers who may be also, you know, offering asset management services in or out of China? Yeah. We are celebrating our 20th anniversary in China this year, Invesco Great Wall was, without question, an early entrant. That has served us well, and that has created growth dynamics for that business that are very hard to replicate. That is, you know, I think our AUM there, I'm gonna use round numbers, around $90 billion or so in AUM through Great Wall or Invesco Great Wall right now. That is really a joint venture with our partner and it is Chinese investment managers creating Chinese solutions for Chinese end investors. It is very much a domestic business, very ring-fenced in nature as well. We are the largest foreign-owned asset manager in China. Again, I think that is a real testament to the strength of the business and to the years that we've been there, and we continue to see really strong growth characteristics and growth dynamics around the business overall. As I mentioned earlier, it's an active market there. It's very nicely balanced between retail and institutional. It's pretty well diversified across asset classes as well. The opportunity as China continues to grow and as the retirement industry in China continues to grow and mature, and the capital markets activities there continue to grow, I think we're very well-positioned. Great. What's sort of the outlook here in terms of, you know, you sort of mentioned growth. Maybe also thinking about some of the differences between that market and others. We talked earlier about the sort of attitude towards fixed income. When the asset values go down, the interest really sort of dries up. Any other sort of nuances to appreciate it or to understand about that industry? How How does sort of the investor base think, you know, perhaps differently versus your, you know, U.S. or European exposure? Sure. I mean, look, it's a maturing investor base. I mean, it is one that continues to develop and has characteristics of maybe the U.S. investor base many decades ago, like 40, 50 years ago in a lot of ways. You've got again, just wealth creation happening there in a retirement industry that is just now really beginning to get legs. That influences a lot of the attitudes and behaviors. What we've seen in the fixed income dynamics over the last six months is a great example of how there is growing investor understanding of what can happen when yields spike and prices fall. As I mentioned, it's an active market, so in terms of you know, overall attitudes and behaviors, you know, there's just not an interest in passive yet because alpha is so easy to create there. There is a bit of a, almost IPO-ish mindset when you launch new products. You really garner a lot of flows and that's where a lot of the interest is right now, and so it's important for us to be launching new products to be in that market and capturing those flows. We are hopeful to launch a few new products in the second quarter, which again, positions us well, assuming demand continues to come back. You also see a lot of demand for more balanced strategies, so I would say higher demand for balance than what you might find in some of the more mature markets. That actually dictates a lot of the strategies we launch, which tend to be some equity, but a lot of balanced, I would say, in nature. What about on the political front? You know, there's always headline news about political tensions between the U.S. and China. You know, you spoke a little bit about how the business is, you know, Chinese management for Chinese investors, but how do you think about these tensions sort of impacting the overall opportunity in China near term and long term? Yeah. Look, it is a challenging environment from a political standpoint right now, and we certainly have, you know, a lot of headlines, and the governments are both really trying to understand each other's positioning at the moment. Because our business is pretty well ring-fenced there, we really try to stay focused on the dynamics of demand in China, which is, as I said, really a function of market growth there and the overall economic growth of China. It's somewhat ring-fenced in nature. We're highly conscious of the dynamics. We're very aware. We stay very close to it on all sides, and are very thoughtful about a variety of scenarios. Our view is that's a market we wanna be in. It's the fastest-growing market that exists for asset management over the next 10 years. We are the dominant foreign-owned player there. We are well-positioned, and we wanna stay close to some of the challenges, but we're also very pleased with the business we have there. Great. Maybe sticking in APAC outside of China, what are sort of the most interesting opportunities for Invesco in that region? Yeah. Looking beyond China, Japan is a very interesting market for us and continues to grow. That had largely historically been more of a fixed income kind of business for us and a little more institutional in its tilt. Now we're starting to see increased pickup on the retail side there and some success on the retail side. We're also seeing increased success with some of our equity solutions. That's a very attractive market for us, and we've actually been quite pleased with some of the slowdown in China that Japan has really filled in the gaps there and picked up some of the inflows over the most recent quarters. Australia is also an interesting market for us. Australia has very much of a barbelled kind of trajectory to it. Our success there really started with our passive capabilities, index solutions and the like. We're now starting to see increased demand for active equities for some of our private real estate, private markets capabilities there. Really starting to see kind of a more balanced growth trajectory overall on the Australian side. Both have been growing nicely and I think offer some diversification in that region overall. Great. My last question on sort of the geographic exposure, just since we're over here in the U.K. I think you reported some pretty meaningful inflows last quarter. What were the key drivers here? I think you mentioned a large institutional mandate. Anything else to be aware of? Definitely large institutional mandate was helpful, over the last quarter. We've also just continued to see improvement, in investment performance, in our U.K. equities in particular, and that's been a real driver of improved performance in the U.K. Of course, just improvement in the environment overall. It's been a long slog here, starting with Brexit and some of our own challenges, and really, focusing on our investment performance, really broadening, some of our focus here has been helpful. You know what? We really don't think of the U.K. as, the U.K. individually. I mean, we really run the business, with continental Europe and the U.K. as one. We think the interconnectivity is really important. We think, the breadth of capabilities we offer actually positions us quite well in the U.K., but also the rest of continental Europe. Great. Move over now and talk about your client segmentation. I think you mentioned earlier that, you know, the retail brand is not as well-known as the institutional brand. On the retail side, can you talk a little bit about the base, your go-to-market strategy? Where are you seeing the most traction, with this investor group? Are you talking retail in general or retail... I'm sorry. The beginning of your question, retail in general or were you on private markets? Retail in general. Okay. Yeah, just retail versus institutional kind of level. I will say my comment on our brand not being as well-known on the retail side was specifically through real estate. Oh. We're quite well-known as it relates to our broader business. Our U.S. wealth management business, in particular, is on every major wirehouse platform. We would be one of the top providers on every wirehouse platform. Retail in particular, I would say just broadly, beyond private markets, is very important for us and is very well-known. One of the things I noted was our QQQ advertising, the marketing support budget that is received for the QQQ, gives us quite a bit of firepower to improve our brand with retail overall. If you're in the U.S., you probably see our QQQ commercials on air during just about every sports program that's out there and on CNBC every morning as well. we tend to burn up the airwaves with that one, and that's created a real brand awareness for us that has improved our overall retail market share. Great. maybe on the institutional side, can you talk a little bit about the pipeline? I think in the last quarter, you indicated it was running on the lower end of the historical range, sort of mid-twenties to mid-thirties $ billions, but you still described it as quite strong. Can you provide a little more color here? Sure. Yeah. With $6.6 billion, I think, was the institutional inflows in the first quarter. That was actually very strong pull-through off the institutional pipeline. It was a bit lower, but on the back of a successful pull-through in the first quarter and rebuilding that pipeline now. It's on the slightly lower side, but not unusually low, not concerningly low. I think more importantly, when you look at the mix of the pipeline, I'm encouraged by what we're seeing in terms of equities and private markets that are represented there. That's actually leading then to an average fee rate that's on the higher side of what we typically see. Institutional mandates, not surprisingly, following the challenges in the first quarter of 2022, you saw institutional mandates be put on pause, remixed, rebalanced, as the markets really went into more corrective territory last year. You're starting to see, again, a little more conviction and those fundings start to come through. Still taking a little longer to fund than what we would have seen prior to a year ago. You know, I would say returning to a pretty healthy normal state at this point. Is the time to fund, is that sort of a function of just the environment or anything else to think through in terms of why that may be the case? Function of the environment. Function of the environment as again, it kind of gets back to the lack of conviction around the path of inflation and the path of the central banks. Regional bank challenges in the U.S. didn't help in February and March as it started to again, create some shifts in sentiment. It's slowly regaining its footing. When I say the average fee rate is attractive, I mean, it's attractive in the sense that it's at or better than our overall average fee rate. Again, you're starting to see institutional kinda come back with some of a risk-on mindset that just simply wasn't there a year ago. Just thinking about demand a little bit between these two segments, what do you think is sort of the key unlock, you know, kind of following the regional bank crisis? Is it confidence that the banks are gonna shake out fine? Is it a better understanding of sort of the inflation trajectory? Is it a clear understanding of, okay, a recession is not gonna come, it's gonna start at this point? What are the kinda like moments to look for that could be kinda catalyst for demand? I think it's a clear conviction on the path of inflation and potential recession. The regional bank situation was a bit of a sideshow that, you know, did create some concern as to whether or not that would create a deeper recession and trying to understand what that path was. Not to suggest it wasn't challenging and real, it is, but it was very unrelated in a lot of respects to the broader concerns but not helpful overall. I think the bigger catalyst is absolutely going to be some conviction or some understanding of when the Fed might pause in the U.S., and some confidence that inflation can be managed. Got it. Maybe lastly here, can you talk a little bit about the solutions business? What are your key offerings? How are these sort of embedded to your client interactions? Yeah. Solutions is really an enabler for us, and it's really embedded in all our client interactions, increasingly something we feel like we can offer, especially on the institutional side as we think about the opportunity just to create customized portfolios. You know, I think it's something that we feel like it becomes a part of our offering and a standard set of our offering that allows us to really meet client needs on a very customized basis. Got it. Maybe let's spend some time sort of at the end of the presentation here talking about margins, capital management. We've seen some kind of downward margin pressure in the last few quarters. I think your adjusted operating margin now is sort of low 30s versus the low 40s, where it was in 2021. Obviously, a lot of this is a function of equity markets and where AUM is. How do you think about expense management and sort of growing your operating margin into this year? Yeah. It has been very challenging last year as it relates to the operating environment. You know, on the one hand, I'm quite pleased with our expense management. On the other hand, you just can't manage expenses fast enough for the kind of compression we saw in the revenue environment, especially when you look at the challenges we had in some of our flagship funds, like our Developing Markets funds and Global Equities, which are some of our higher fee funds, which were very challenged and in asset classes that were very out of favor in 2022. That created real downward pressure that we certainly easy to manage your variable expenses, but your variable expenses become, you know, a small component of what you have to manage overall. I feel pretty good about the work we were able to do. I'm very pleased that the cost we took out going back to 20 and 21, actually put us in a better position to weather the environment we've been in. I think from here we have the opportunity to really manage our expenses well, and to think about, you know, relatively flat expense environment that should serve us well as revenue does improve from here. I think it will improve both on the back of flows but also market improvement. Market improvement, you know, we're starting to see some modest impact from that. You know, we're focused, and we didn't take our eye off the ball last year in investing in a lot of our foundational capabilities. We put in a new GL system last year. We put in a new human capital system. We're working on moving as much of our data to the cloud as possible. These are really important things that need to be done that one can't turn on and off or shouldn't turn on and off in a market environment. We stayed the course, and, you know, I think that's gonna serve us well as we continue to grow and scale the firm. In terms of your investing priorities, you mentioned some of the, you know, moving to the cloud, HCM. What are the other kind of focus areas in terms of product, geographical expansion, anything like that? How do you think about balancing, you know, cost management with, you know, investing for growth? Yeah. We have been investing in our growth, all along. We've been able to do that really by remixing our expense base. Our areas of focus are the ones we talk about consistently on every earnings call and every presentation. A lot of it we've already spoken of today, private markets, ETFs, China, our solutions business, our fixed income business. Those are the areas we're really focused on growing. We continue to reallocate our cost base into these areas to try to create outsized growth in those areas. Again, we think that that's where we're going to see the greatest growth in the coming years. We know we're really well-positioned. We've got capabilities we can grow off of. We think we've got an opportunity to continue to reallocate our cost base there. Great. sort of same subject, but thinking about the balance sheet. Can you sort of talk about your capital management priorities in terms of, you know, there's a debt maturity coming up in January. How do you think about balancing your dividend growth, buybacks, debt paydown, and the like? Sure. Well, we announced a 7% increase in our common dividend, a couple of weeks ago, so pleased to be able to continue to improve the common dividend. We do have a debt maturity coming up in January. We are, right now planning to redeem that, through a mix of cash, and perhaps drawings on our revolver if we need to, coming in to the end of this year. Very pleased, to report a couple weeks ago that we refinanced our revolver, and we actually upsized it from $1.5 billion-$2 billion. We were able to do that at existing terms and conditions and extend the maturity five years. That was no small feat in the midst of a lot of banking challenges as we were out to market doing that in February and March. Really pleased that we were able to upsize that to $2 billion. We feel like we have ample liquidity and access to capital to continue to pay down the capital stack. Today our debt's at the lowest level it's been in 10 years, so redeeming that $600 million note in January continues to put us in a very favorable position. As I think about our priorities from there, investing in our own growth, investing in our organic growth capabilities remains our number one opportunity and an area that we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we grow our capabilities faster. Share repurchases for us are really to the extent we have excess cash and no other good organic growth opportunities. Shouldn't say no other good. Excess cash beyond the opportunity to continue to invest in our own organic growth, we really do think we've got the opportunity to capture some growth ahead of us in the next three to five years, we're really focused on getting ready for that. Great. What about on the inorganic side? You know, how do you think about M&A conceptually? What does the current pipeline of opportunities look like? What are your sort of top priorities? How do you think about when to, you know, buy versus build? Sure. You know, as we look at our capability set today, we have no obvious gaps in our capabilities. We've really successfully filled in a lot of those gaps over the last 10 years. When we think about inorganic opportunities, it has to be some sort of adjacency that fills a gap that we have in the product set today. It's not our primary area of focus. It's not to say we won't, when something does become a need or become obvious, it's not our primary area of focus. It's not where we're spending a lot of time because, again, we think we have most of the capabilities. We just need to invest and grow them faster. In terms of, you know, the pipeline, again, understanding it's not much of a priority, but in terms of the pipeline, valuations you might see in the market, anything kind of noticeable now, you know, on the alternative asset manager side where there's a lot more, you know, of an expectation, there's a lot of transactions. We sort of see a continuing disparity between, you know, buyers and sellers. Any kind of color there in terms of, again, understanding that it's not a high priority, but in terms of how those conversations look? Yeah. I mean, the valuations were certainly quite high over the last few years, and there was a real disparity from where the traditionals were trading. You know, I'd say if anything, you're starting to see where those multiples are increasingly made up in earn-outs. The upfront consideration is reasonably low. You've seen that kind of pull back over the last year. You also haven't seen a whole lot get done in the last year, probably more the year prior than what we've seen in the last year. There's still some interesting opportunities out there. Again, it has to make sense. Our focus is really on we don't want duplication, culture matters more than anything. We'd have to find the right tech in and the right culture for something to make sense. Great. You know, I'd like to ask about something you sort of mentioned before about sort of the internal, you know, tech investments you've been making, HCM, moving to the cloud. Can you maybe talk about that in a little more detail? What sort of benefits do you expect to, you know, kind of reap from those investments? Thinking about the cloud in particular, it's been a big topic for a lot of asset managers, exchanges, sort of you name it, across financial services. You know, it's really critical in this environment to maintain the ability to be nimble, and it's harder to do when your data is tied up in a tech stack that just isn't as flexible and isn't as nimble. Getting data moved to the cloud, getting our GL moved to the cloud, getting our human capital in the cloud, all of those enable future opportunities to really continue to think about our overall tech architecture in a more flexible way and build on more innovative solutions and really get our data to a place that delivers insights that are actionable. You know, in some respects, you don't get immediate benefit, but it's critical. You really can't think about how to get to the kind of scale we would like to get to in five years if you don't have that really stable and flexible architecture. Got it. Well, Allison, we're just about out of time here. What a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much. Really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Appreciate it.