AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. (NYSE:AB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Onur Erzan : I mean on the commercial side, the pipeline remains diversified. We have a significant pipeline and again, the extension is very important here. Obviously flagship funds are always important for the economics of the platform, but we are seeing a lot of nice extensions. For instance insurance, we started with Equitable but we are getting a lot of interest from other insurance clients as well. So those kind of extensions are quite additive to our strategy. And then furthermore, obviously you could argue some of the dislocations in the market with the banking crisis earlier in the year, which happened after we closed the transaction. It creates a lot of interesting opportunities for deployments as the banks are looking for partners to create more capital efficiency, and deal with some of the upcoming new capital requirements from Basel and other regulatory bodies.

So we see that being another momentum to hopefully will accelerate our deployment in the coming quarters.

Seth Bernstein: Just to finish it up, the pipeline is $3.7 billion for CarVal. Just to put that in context, Dan. So hopefully that answers your question.

Dan Fannon : Great, that’s very helpful. I guess also just thinking about the fee rate at a consolidated level, mix and beta and some of the things that put a little bit more pressure on it to date. The backlog seems like that’s additive. So, I guess just thinking about the fee rate and what your outlook is over the kind of next 12 months and how you think that can trend based upon business trends, demand trends and asset flows.

Bill Siemers : Hey Dan, it’s Bill. I mean, we continue to expect the fee rate to be mixed dependent. I mean, we’ve had experienced organic growth in lower fee products such as money markets, munis, private placements. We are seeing outflows in higher fee active equities. So we’re definitely going to be dependent on markets, interest rates, investor risk and return appetite. I mean, but we do have, as we’ve mentioned a few times, the institutional channel is supported by higher private oils exposure with the pipeline fee rate three times the channel average. I mean, so that’s encouraging there, but no specific guidance.

Dan Fannon : Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from the line of John Dunn with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

John Dunn : Thank you. You guys talked about potentially a third positive year for private wealth management. Maybe just looking ahead over the next year, can you frame what strategies you think are going to be in demand that could potentially set up a fourth positive year?

Onur Erzan : Sure, yeah. As you pointed out, John, year-to-date we had healthy organic growth. As the general risk of environment that’s played out, obviously some of the flows have concentrated in shorter duration or lower risk strategies, on market funds, direct indexing and alike. It’s hard to predict quarter-by-quarter. But if you think about the longer term, we continue to be quite optimistic about our ability to deploy private credit in the channel. As you know, we have around $10 billion of alternatives in our private wealth platform. We have done it for many years. And as we launch new products, as I mentioned earlier, with CarVal, with others, it will help with the growth. And then from a broader perspective, despite all the kind of uncertainties with the economy and everything else, we stayed the course in terms of adding financial advisors to our platform.

So year-to-date our financial advisor headcount is up by 4%. So we are taking a through the cycle mindset in terms of investing in client facing resources in our private wealth business. So that should hopefully help us as a catalyst as well.