Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Up next, we have SEI Investments, and on their behalf, we have CEO Ryan Hicke. Ryan is going to run through a few slides, and if we have time left at the end, I'll ask a few questions. With that, Ryan, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks for the invite down. I appreciate you having us. Welcome, everybody. As Patrick said, I have about 10 slides, which we'll go through probably in about 15- 18 minutes and provide some time for questions or some time for some extra sunshine. That's Brad's slide. For anybody in the room that is not familiar with SEI, the way that we think about the organization is we believe that we have world-class pillars and world-class platforms in three primary areas of wealth management. Asset management, administration, and recently with the acquisition of Stratos last year, we expanded that footprint into advice. We incorporate those platforms and services, and we go to a variety of markets. Those markets tend to be large investment managers, banks, intermediaries, including RIAs, both globally and inside the U.S. We package those platforms in a variety of different forms to help those organizations truly drive their strategic growth. If you think about SEI and you're not familiar with the company, we have an Investment Managers Services unit where we are taking our administration platforms, which is operational capabilities combined with technology to deliver fund administration to alternative and traditional investment managers. In the banking business, we take our technology capabilities around investment processing, combine those with back-office capabilities in our trust company, take that out to large global banks, but also predominantly focused on regional and community banks inside the U.S. and private client investment managers in the U.K. and other areas. Then on the asset management side, historically, we have taken that out to two markets. Directly to the institutional space, defined benefit schemes, foundations, endowments with our OCIO capabilities, and then also leveraging that asset management expertise with investment processing to the intermediary advisor, broker-dealer community inside the U.S. That's really kind of the footprint and how we go to market as a grounding. I took over responsibility as CEO April of 2022, so I'm coming up to four years. My entire career has been at SEI. I started with SEI in 1998. This slide, though, is really exciting evidence of how the changes in strategy and changes in positioning over the last few years are starting to bear themselves out in results. If you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, the company has always done well. We've always had a really robust balance sheet, tremendous cash flow, been really significant in the markets in which we operate, and have always had a tremendous appetite to continue to reinvest in our businesses for future growth. I think over the last three or four years, that deployment of capital, the addition of talent, and a little bit of some changes to our operating model have really translated into differentiated results that you can see in the middle. Where do we expect that momentum to continue? We did an investor day in September. That presentation's available on our website. It goes into significant detail, both corporately and unit by unit, of how do we expect to continue to accelerate these results, deliver these results, not just at the enterprise level, but also at the unit level. When we think about where we are today, and what I'm gonna focus on maybe for the next 10 minutes, is really we're grounded right now strategically in five key areas that we believe are gonna be our major accelerants to continued growth. I'm gonna spend probably one minute or 90 seconds on each one and just try to unpack what are we doing and what does it mean and how is that differentiated. When we talk about reimagining asset management, think about that, though, in the context of how I described the company a few minutes ago, of how we have gone to market historically in our advisor business domestically and our institutional business has really been oriented on what we would define as turnkey asset management. We have evolved and graduated from that over the last, I'd say, 7-8 years to really open up more of the architecture for advisors to move upmarket in terms of larger advisors. Today, we have about 8,000 advisors across the U.S. who are SEI clients, both broker-dealer affiliated and pure RIA. About, I'd say 80% of those are consuming SEI asset management as well as our custody and administration capabilities. The remaining are just taking the custody platform. There is a significant market opportunity for us to expand that foundation and expand that core. We've increased investments in our go-to-market strategy, more salespeople. We brought in a new leader of that business 18 months ago. We've also coupled that when you think about moving upmarket and moving into that larger RIA space, moving into more of the consolidators and aggregators, we've had to expand the investment management lineup. We have invested in more products, more capabilities beyond just mutual fund portfolios. We've introduced more ETFs into our lineup, more SMAs, more direct indexing, and also brought in some third-party technology capabilities around unified managed household and direct indexing to really expand that aperture for us to not only be able to service larger clients, but to give firms more choice in that space. When we talk about growing the wealth management capability, we felt strongly as an executive team a few years ago that we needed a strategic foothold in the advice space. There seems to be a clear, enduring, and durable value to the willingness for private clients to pay for really strong fee-based objective advice. That was the thesis behind us taking the investment in Stratos. The idea behind Stratos was really twofold. How does SEI expand its footprint into that advice space so that we can start participating differently in that revenue stream moving forward? Also how do we now have real-time interaction with advisors and end clients to really help inform how we're developing our solutions and capabilities to drive more growth in all of our intermediary businesses? The second talks about boosting international returns, and the slide is probably a little bit more dramatic in terms of when you see the delta between our domestic margins and our non-U.S. margins. Just for some context, about 85% of SEI's revenue comes out of the U.S., 15% is non-U.S. You can see a significant difference obviously in the margin profile. We made a decision about six months ago to send one of our existing executives, Sanjay Sharma, who runs our banking business. He will continue to run that banking business. He is gonna run our international business. The idea there and the strategy there is to create a more unified strategy and growth profile for our non-U.S. businesses. Today, we operate in Dublin, we operate in Luxembourg, we operate in Asia, Canada. We have a big footprint in the U.K. There isn't a very unified, cohesive strategy in terms of how do we go to market? How do we actually leverage our workforce? How are we thinking about margin appreciation, and how are we deploying capital in the areas that we believe will have the greatest return on investment? Do I expect the right-hand side of this slide for the black to get to the green? No, I don't. Do I expect a gradual continued improvement in those international margins? I absolutely do, and it's an area that actually will be very accretive to SEI's overall margin profile and our ability to expand our own earnings corporately. This slide is probably the area where we spend the most time as a leadership team right now, and probably the biggest difference from how we ran the company a few years ago. For right or wrong, I think that SEI historically would try to invest in each of its businesses to give each of them an equal opportunity to succeed, and I never really thought that made a tremendous amount of sense. I think we needed to drive more data-driven decisions in terms of, well, which markets had the biggest opportunity? What was the competitive landscape? Where was the longevity of our ability to continue to win? We made some strategic bets and pivots a few years ago in terms of allocation of R&D dollars, new talent, new investments, and started to make more of a bet on specific segments and solutions that we really believed that we could win and repeatedly win. You're seeing this bear itself out in results. If you start in the top left, we didn't have a professional services business two and a half years ago. When Sanjay took over banking, he had a clear man-mandate that he had to get those margins expanded from low single digits back into the historical range of kinda 25%, 30% margins over time. We had a threefold strategy that we talked openly, you know, with the street about. Remember Patrick around that and said, "First things first, you have to stop losing clients." We needed a real significant strong focus on client retention. The second thing is we had to be really disciplined on what segments did we believe that we could sell our operational and technology capabilities in that would actually value those capabilities, that we could accelerate growth, and what additional services could we bring to bear? Sanjay's done a great job on the first two, but he's really hit the ball out of the park with the third, with the introduction of more professional services. To give some of that some kind of clarity, we have an SEI Data Cloud offering. We take that Data Cloud offering out to a lot of our banking clients that allow them to ingest and harmonize more of the data that they have across multiple platforms, make business decisions, drive business intelligence off of that. That's a repeatable service that we think that we can not only sell to existing clients but prospective clients. We've gotten more discipline around charging for the work we do around implementation and integration and cyber. That professional services, you hear us talk about that on the calls, but it's something we're gonna start to delineate a little bit more clearly around what is truly one time, you know, revenue around implementation, and what do we think, and can we prove that it's repeatable? He also pivoted us really to the regional and community bank space. It isn't as though that we departed our focus on the largest banks. Inside the U.S., there is a tremendous opportunity for regional and community banks who want to compete in wealth, and they don't want to build those capabilities themselves. They don't tend to have the capital to be able to compete on an ongoing basis, with those types of investments in infrastructure. SEI is so well-positioned to be able to deliver technology, investment processing, and in some cases, asset management to the regional and community bank space. That's an area that has really borne itself out in a lot of our sales results the last 24 months. Also the key for us there is they're clients that we know that we can sell and install in a reasonable amount of time and make sure that they are extremely referenceable and satisfied. It just begets more referenceability in sales, the more effective and successful we are in that segment. I mentioned earlier the move up to kinda more the enterprise RIAs. That $5 billion, $50 billion, $500 billion RIA, we have a great conversation to have with those organizations. The breadth of capabilities that we can bring to bear for those firms to really start to institutionalize their operating model, really think about how they grow scale, especially the consolidators and aggregators that need to be thinking about that as they're on the acquisition trail. That's definitely been an area that Michael Lane's been focused, and you'll continue to see SEI invest and continue to win there. Probably our largest area of success the last few years and continue will be global alternative investment managers. I say this pretty much in every meeting, the appetite for large alternative investment managers to insource operations and technology is lower than when we started this presentation. It dissipates at a very, very rapid rate right now. They want to deploy their capital on product creation, alpha generation, distribution, sales. They wanna be partnering, though, with proven, credible, scalable organizations that will make sure that the fund operations, that the technology, and that the delivery of their services every day go off without a hitch. This is complex stuff, right? We're not dealing with just traditional assets here. We are dealing with very complex global brands that have clients across the world in very, very different types of sophisticated fund structures. SEI is extremely well-positioned here. We continue to win more business from existing clients. As insourcers continue to look to outsourcing, we feel really strongly that we will be able to continue to win more of our share of that new business in that space. Brad and I talk about this slide a lot because it looks like your classic, "This slide tells me nothing." In some cases, you could be right, Bruce. It's not true. I know you wouldn't. Really one of the biggest changes we made as an organization in the last few years is thinking about how do we integrate our workforce and operating systems across SEI. For, for right or wrong, SEI was running as a collection of verticals a few years ago. And it served us well, and we can tell ourselves that it gave us speed and focus and clarity, and I think in some cases it did. It negated the opportunity for us to really drive leverage across the organization and our operating model. It also was mitigating our ability to tell the story we wanted to tell to the market. The market was only really assessing SEI for the vertical with which they interacted and was not appreciating kind of the breadth of the capabilities or the size of the types of clients we were operating with in other segments. This whole continuum here is around how are we continuing to change the organization and leverage more enterprise-wide capabilities both externally and internally. When we think about automation, we think about AI, we have a single technology unit that runs across SEI now. We are doing things more at the company level and then adjusting where needed at the unit level given their specific needs. It has actually been one of the biggest drivers to the earnings expansion that you've seen from SEI, especially over the last 8- 12 quarters. As Brad and I talked about with Sean Denham and others in New York, we expect that margin expansion to continue, and some of that is gonna be driven by continued leverage and operating model, and some of it will be continue to be driven by the right type of top-line revenue growth. You have capital allocation, and SEI is in a very fortunate position oftentimes with this conversation. The company has an extremely strong balance sheet. We generate a tremendous amount of cash flow every year. We think about how do we return that cash flow to shareholders. Our first and primary use of that capital is always to reinvest in the business and think about how do we use those R&D dollars to drive more growth for our existing footprint and think about new capabilities and solutions. That's a beautiful thing as CEO of this organization, that that's just embedded in our DNA. Like, we're always thinking first about where can we invest? How do we actually make sure we're not accruing technical debt? How do we stay modern? How are we expanding the suite of services and capabilities? It's very liberating. That's our primary use of capital. The secondary and tertiary uses of capital historically were really just share buybacks and the dividend. I would say over the last few years, we have really thought about maybe a little bit of a tier in between that primary and secondary around how are we investing in venture opportunities? How are we using some of that capital for M&A, as we did with Stratos? R&D doesn't always have to be just SEI homegrown solutions. How are we integrating more world-class capabilities? One example we talk about is we did an investment in December with a firm called Avantos. Avantos is an AI-native onboarding workflow platform. We will incorporate some of those capabilities into our front office suite for our banking and advisor clients and leverage some of that workflow capability in IMS. Instead of us, I feel like a few years ago, we would have tried to build a lot of that ourselves. Now we're also looking around and saying, "Hey, if there's a great opportunity out there, and we can own part of that company, and we can get access to their talent," and we're thinking differently around how do we actually integrate more of our workforce through externships, it's a big differentiator for us. You can see there that for us it's more just about where are we spending. It's we're always thinking about how are we maximizing that total shareholder return, but setting SEI up for longevity to make sure that we're well-positioned, not just in two weeks, but in two years and five years. It's odd. We had 12 back-to-back meetings today, and nobody's brought up AI. I was hoping somebody would bring it up here. I just think this world has changed, and it'd be ignorant for us not to proactively talk about it. I can give you, like, our take on this is a little bit varied. Luckily for SEI, we had started a lot of this stuff about 24 months ago. We made an investment in a firm called TIFIN, which is an AI-only business. We saw some of these things coming, and we knew that we needed to be able to get more access, and we needed to be able to integrate more of those capabilities. I already mentioned the Avantos. We certainly are constantly challenging ourselves to think about where are these gonna be accelerants to SEI and where can they be disruptive? I think where we sit right now, based on the fact that the majority of our capabilities are technology combined with services and people and solutions, we feel like our ability to incorporate and harness AI is much more of an opportunity and accelerant than it would be a deterrent to SEI. That doesn't mean we have our head in the sand. It doesn't mean we're not watching what could happen in certain areas, and it doesn't mean every one of our businesses is insulated from this. Brad and I were having this conversation on the plane and also today, is that if the Anthropic release had happened two weeks ago and you didn't have a ticker in front of you, I would have thought that was great news for the SEIs of the world because I would see SEI and a lot of our peers as the firms that are capable of figuring out how to integrate some of those solutions and build more of that talent in-house to drive more scale and productivity. The one thing we're probably doing differently over the last couple weeks, we had three streams going inside SEI at the end of last year. We had one AI initiative going on around automation, around scale, productivity, and how do we drive more throughput. We had another initiative going on around how are we incorporating more AI-enabled solutions into our platforms. I don't like the phrase plugins, but more of these extensions to our capability set. Then we had started down a path of setting up a little unit to really think disruptively around what new businesses could we launch with AI, where could we leverage AI to disrupt SEI. I think in the last few weeks, the only thing that has fundamentally changed in our thinking is how do we create that in a more cohesive, easy-to-understand story, not just for the external community, but for ourselves and the board to say these investments we're making around AI, automation, where do we see risks? Where do we see opportunity? For right now, we remain very excited about our ability to actually drive continued growth. What I would say as color commentary, our clients are looking to SEI to figure out how to leverage this as opposed to they're thinking right now about how do they leverage it to displace us. We may not occupy that position forever, but that's where we are right now. It's been good for us that we've been proactive at the end of 2025 with a lot of our clients talking about what we were doing in a lot of these spaces, which I think gives them comfort that we're constantly innovating, we're constantly thinking about how are we leveraging and harnessing, whether it's tokenization, AI, automation, and other capabilities that are out there to bring better services or easier-to-use platforms available for our client base. I kept that to 21 minutes exactly. More than happy to answer questions. I mean, that is a 30,000 ft flyby of SEI, because we are a pretty diversified business, so it's not the easiest firm just to get down to a level of granularity in 21 minutes. I did the best I could. No, it was a great overview. Appreciate it. Great. Yes, surprised that AI came up. Maybe just to dig in there, you kinda talked about how you guys are combined technology and service and software provider. How do you see, like, that bundled solution that you're providing as maybe being differentiated and less at risk versus some other solutions that might be out there? Yeah. I think, Patrick, when you look at. Let's take two of our businesses. Let's take IMS as an example. When we're doing all the fund accounting, we're doing the NAV, the waterfall calculations, everything for some of these large organizations. The precision required for that is extreme, right? The cost of failure is significant, so it's gotta be right. That doesn't mean that AI can't be an enabler to some of that, but there is, you know, you and I aren't gonna be able to write code a platform that's gonna displace that process overnight. I think the combination of what we're doing with the people and the technology there is really hard just to replicate with technology alone. I think the flip side to that, and we're not seeing this, but if somebody believed that they could write their own code through AI for a principal and income accounting platform, and that would displace TRUST 3000 and SWP, they would still then need the back office, they would still need the trust company, they would still need all the regulated infrastructure that we have. I'm certainly not ignorant or suggesting that the speed at which this moving will accelerate, but also I think sometimes people lose sight of the mind of the buyer. What I mean by that is the size and scale of the organizations that we work with are extremely careful and protective of their brand and reputation, so they are also not gonna be just jumping in two feet to things that aren't proven, aren't credible, aren't scalable. Which is why I was saying to you that the last couple weeks we've had more, and I would say very friendly, positive inbounds from the heads of a lot of our clients in banking and IMS just saying, "If you guys are available, can you guys come up and talk to us about what you're doing with AI?" They wanna be able to answer to their boards about what they're doing, which puts us in a really good spot as partners, as long, Patrick, as we stay aggressive and continue to execute and show progress, which I'm confident we will. You said you don't like the term plugins, but extensions is kinda how you think about it. Extensions is a great one. Is there an opportunity for you to monetize those extensions? Absolutely. I absolutely think we can because I think there's two areas we can do that. One is I think as we think about expanding our footprint inside of some of these organizations, the ease at which we can deliver. Like, our platforms sometimes in certain areas aren't the easiest to use, and I think the simplicity is gonna win at the end of the day. Some of those extensions are making that interface between the advisor and the end investor and the end portfolio manager a lot easier. In some of these cases, they are absolutely willing, Patrick, to pay for, you know, a new product or a new platform that could actually stand alone if we're willing to incorporate that into our solution. We can certainly see that as an upsell possibility. Got it. You know, another current event I think is the private credit markets. There's growing concern. Hey, are we starting to see cracks in part of that market? Yeah. Yet your investment managers business has continued to do really well, and it sounds like your pipeline is in great shape. What are you seeing right now in investment managers? I think the pipeline in investment managers is extremely strong. I think that was back to what I was starting to, you know, unpack a little bit 10 minutes ago around the direction of travel and the speed of travel for firms that wanna outsource, Patrick, is extremely high right now. Specific to a product space, you know, we are one of the largest private credit administrators across the globe, if not the largest, as you know. Or maybe there's two nuances that people need to understand about SEI. One is our revenue and business model is on committed capital, not mark to market. It doesn't insulate us from everything, but it's very different than, I think, some other organizations. I think the other thing is we are still predominantly and almost exclusively on the institutional side of private credit. We didn't have the TA capabilities and some of the other capabilities for some of the retail BDCs and private credit funds. We will have more of those capabilities in Q2. I'm not saying that completely insulates us from that. I actually think if there was a significant, you know, unraveling of private credit and some global catastrophic implosion, that would manifest itself less in our day-to-day run rate in IMS. It would manifest itself way more in our new business sales and our pipeline and our ability to continue to drive kinda the sales growth that you've been seeing there. We talked about this in a couple meetings today. We did about $150 million of sales last year. IMS was a significant portion of that. Private credit wasn't, you know, the majority of that in IMS. CITs are doing really well, infrastructure, real estate, so we're still pretty diversified across the suite. Got it. Then maybe just talk a little bit about why you're winning in the IMS space. Like, it seems like it's relatively crowded. We'll have SS&C here tomorrow. Yeah. a lot of big brand names that compete. Yeah. You seem to be winning more than your fair share of the market share. I mean, I think SS&C do a really nice job. I think Citco does a really nice job. In that alternative space, as I mentioned, the complexity, there's just a. Including those firms in this. The firms that are able to handle that level of complexity and scale is not a large number of firms. I think our continued investment, Patrick, as you know, in people, process, and technology, and it sounds trite, and I'm sure everybody sits up here and says it, but we do it, and we are constantly investing in that business and in people and in the service side. The third thing I would tell you is right now, and there's hopefully some wood around, our clients are extremely referenceable. At the end of the day, these are large global brands, but they all know each other. They know each other pretty well. The firms that are thinking about outsourcing are calling their peers that are SEI clients that have outsourced, and they're hearing really good things, and we need to protect that, and we need to continue. I could say white glove service, but it is a big part of it. I think we're in front of those clients having different conversations a lot of times, Patrick. You know, I mentioned this earlier, but the value proposition for IMS has really moved from ops for the fund to ops for the firm. We are getting asked to do much different things around data technology and operational deliveries beyond just, "Can you do our capital calls and make sure the NAVs are correct?" We're just well equipped for that. It is something we are extremely aware of, and sensitive to and not a position that we will yield. Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Maybe time for one more question. You mentioned in the slide at the end, you guys are starting to broaden aperture in terms of uses of your capital, and Stratos was a relatively major use in recent quarters. Yeah. What have you learned from that deal so far that validates your thesis in buying that company or investing in that company? I think a couple things we've learned from that. I mean, it was about 5% of our market cap, so not, you know, we didn't bet the bank, right? I think the diligence that we went through, Patrick, to make sure that what we were looking for in a partner lined up with what that partner was looking for as well, I think we did a really nice job of that because we have learned, I think even in the first 90 days, that the ability to let that team go continue to do what they're doing well, but their openness to where SEI could help them really think about scaling the investment management side and scaling the investment processing side. I think there was a natural nervousness. I did a dinner early on with the top Stratos advisors, I think there was a natural nervousness that we were gonna come in and say, "Now here are all the things you have to do." We were talking earlier, like, they're big LPL clients, Stratos. Great. Cool. We're totally fine with that. you know, we've got a good relationship with LPL. I think our ability to actually be deliberate and thoughtful, but patient and say, "What could we do incrementally and consistently to help Jeff and that team build a much more scalable consolidator?" Their receptivity to that is really high, and I think now that we're over the early anxiousness that we were gonna come in and just tell them, "This is what we're gonna do." Also, I think we had some anxiousness that they were gonna say, "No, we're just gonna run this business." Right now it's on really strong footing. They're very good, Patrick, at identifying, acquiring, and integrating the right type of advisor into their ecosystem, and they're disciplined about the operating model that they want those advisors to adopt. If the advisor wants to go do his or her own thing, Jeff and the team are pretty convicted to say, "Then you're probably not the right fit for us." As we bring more SEI capabilities into their centralized investment solution and as well as offer SWP as more of a platform, I think that'll actually continue to actually show more in the bottom line, in the financials. All right. Perfect. Well, we will wrap it up there, but we'll have a breakout session downstairs. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.