Mark Lee: Patrick, the one thing I think I would add is, I think the difficulty of the last two years, which has affected really everybody in this space, I think disproportionately affected our competitors. So oddly enough, I actually think that we come out going into 2024 in almost a stronger competitive position relative to the other players in this space. We still believe, fundamentally, there’s going to be consolidation, and especially after the experience of the last two years, we’re convinced that will happen, and you’ll start to see that. And you’ll start to see — we’ve always believed that this is a business for which you’ll eventually see a few major players, and I think the last two years has kind of increased our conviction in that belief.
Patrick Moley: All right. Great, great color. And maybe just a follow-up. If we think about expenses, you did a good job keeping the headcount flat in 2023. I think I heard Mark say that, you were expecting to kind of keep that hiring freeze in effect, but you maybe indicated that you could look to hire more people in Europe. So can you just maybe talk about what you expect the headcount growth to look like in 2024, and then maybe what that looks like in Europe versus the US business?
Mark Lee: Yes. Patrick, we — as I said, I mean, we’re still maintaining flat headcount. And in fact, the numbers that I shared, we basically funded our headcount growth in Europe, which went from two people at the end of 2023 to eight people at the end of — sorry, two people at the end of 2022 to eight people at the end of 2023 and continuing to grow and invest in Europe. We basically managed to keep our total headcount flat while continuing to invest in Europe. And so, that’s our view still, right? I mean, as you can tell from a lot of the commentary, we do think that 2024 is a very different year as we start off the year. We know rate cuts are coming, right? We can see the glimmer of IPOs starting to come back to the market.
Obviously, the kind of recent experience with Astera and Reddit, we’re very positive for the market. Other big names being talked about, Rubrik, Strike Plat [ph], Fanatics, Waystar. I mean it sounds like people are starting to feel good about IPOs maybe in the second half of 2024. So, I do think that kind of IPO is coming back, the great reset of private companies raising capital even when they’re having to take a down round, I think that pace is expanding and I think all of those things will help. So, our focus is on continuing to manage that balance between investing in our business as we’ve been doing, rolling out new products, while keeping our costs very lean and to reduce our burn through top line growth.
Patrick Moley: All right. Thanks so much guys.
Mark Lee: Yes.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm from UBS Financial. Please go ahead.
Alex Kramm: Yes, hi. Good evening everyone. Maybe following up on a couple of the things I’ve already discussed, just hoping that we can be a little bit more specific. I mean, on the trading side, I mean you gave a lot of good color on what you’re seeing in terms of IOIs and spreads, et cetera. But look, we’re like two more days in the quarter. So, hoping maybe you can be a little bit more specific in terms of the volumes that you’re seeing. If you don’t want to give exact numbers, maybe at least directionally or directionally with some magnitude of how we’re trending so far in the first quarter? I mean, again, the quarter is almost over. Thank you.
Kelly Rodriques: Yes. So, Alex, it’s Kelly. I think we’ve made the decision to stay away from providing detailed color and I was pretty deliberate in some of the terms that I use there, which is we are seeing the market improve, and we are seeing an indication that while we benefited in some ways from the interest rate environment around our custody business, we’re starting to see a shift. You can see it in the Q4 numbers regarding the growth in volume that we saw in Q4, and we see that trend continuing in 2024 around what Mark described as the marketplace business. I’d say the only caution that I want to reiterate is that there is a certain level of quarter-over-quarter variability in terms of how the market works between the end of the year and the first part of the next year.
I’d say we’re very confident in the pipeline and the pipeline has improved. And I think we’d rather not talk about where we’re going to be in Q1. I have, in the past quarters, talked about being at or above in the successive quarters as we move through time and I’d say I’ll leave it that. We’re optimistic in the pipeline and continued recovery. But it’s clear to us that it continues to recover at a point where we can’t commit to every quarter being up into the right from the previous one.
Mark Lee: Alex and I would add that as you’re tracking a lot of these other leading indicators in the PMU and the FIO that, as you know from our prior conversations, there’s improvement in sentiment in these indicators, but there’s always a lag between the time that people start to regain their confidence to invest in the time it takes to settle and close transactions, right? That’s the 30- to 45-day window typically in the private markets. And so — and there’s always generally a big push at year-end. A lot of institutions want to kind of get certain trades in before the end of the year. So that always happens every year where Q4, there’s a big push, and then you start off the year fresh. So I think that’s — yes, I think I would leave it at that.
