The second — I’m going to name 4 of them. The second is just customization. You’re seeing from technology advances that clients want either specific vehicles or the portfolios to be customized. And so if you look at this quarter’s trends, things like our SMA, which is positive, Legg Mason made us a top 3 SMA provider. You’re seeing more and more flows going into SMAs, ETFs, while we were late arguably to the passive ETF space, we were actually early in the active ETF space. And today, at our $24 billion in ETFs, the largest category is actually active ETFs.
And we’re seeing that in markets like Europe, where the regulatory environment has changed, there’s a greater demand now for ETFs. And we’re having success in our like green bond and Paris Alliance. So a lot of the ESG ETFs are doing very well in Europe.
And then finally, in kind of that customization vehicle being — vehicle [indiscernible] is the direct indexing. And not only we’re seeing positive flows consistently with Canvas. But we added 11 new partners to the 88 partners that we have with Canvas. And once you get embedded in — from the — in the pipes, you continue to see flow. So it’s just a great opportunity.
But I think what gets us most excited about Canvas is the fact that as you’re seeing this trend towards greater SMAs, Canvas was built as a technology platform. Some of the direct indexing were more about people who focused on tax optimization. This is truly a technology platform. So we can see taking traditional active portfolios of being able to tax optimize as well as tilting. And you have to have the right technology for that.
The third big trend, I think, is really global distribution. You have 1 billion people that are entering the middle class, 87% of those are in Asia. And so we’ve got that massive global distribution. We were in Taiwan in 1985. We were the first foreign manager in India. We have local asset management capabilities in emerging markets like in the Middle East, China, India, Brazil as well as local capabilities in a lot of developed markets. And so we think we’re really uniquely positioned to take advantage of that trend. And as a matter of fact, this quarter, you saw non-U.S. flows were positive outside the U.S.
And then the fourth and, obviously, really important is the technology and technological advances. And that’s where I would say, I think the players — so far, if you play the AI move, you’ve been playing in the picks and shovels of artificial intelligence, it’s going to be the firms that really figure out how to make this work for them to make it a competitive advantage that’s important. You’ll hear it about an announcement later this week where we are announcing a strategic partnership on some AI work that we’re doing with one of those big players.
And then the secondary is blockchain. And we came out with a tokenized first one to have a 40 Act shareholder system on the public blockchain. We came out with the tokenized money market fund in 2021. So the first to do that, we are actually a node validator in the space with 11 different nodes. It’s an area we know well, and we think it’s going to be really significant. We announced a partnership with a UAE-based firm to leverage — they’re going to leverage our blockchain technology, shareholder servicing systems to launch a stable coin, and we’ll be managing the portfolio there.
So as you bring those together, now to answer your question, it’s going to be — it’s about execution, right? And I could tell you, I think we found it was probably — it’s a challenge when you take — you do 10 different acquisitions and you’re trying to choose best athlete for your distribution team, and we genuinely believe we put together the best team, but there are headwinds to that where you get a new wholesaler in a region and you’ve broken relationships maybe with the prior wholesalers clients. And so it takes time to build those relationships back. But we feel like we’re really seeing that pay off this quarter.
You see it in our pipeline, I mean, to go from $13 billion to $20 billion and not have — that’s not any Great-West Life. That’s just good, solid wins in the pipeline growth. Interesting statistic is our core sales, and we define core sales, sales less than $100 million. So these are the ones that just — you get on an adviser’s platform and they continue to just allocate to you. So excluding Putnam, those are up 14%. And again, those are where that wholesalers out there meeting and so a good success there.
And then if you look at inflows, excluding reinvested distributions Great-West Life, they’re up 17%. So we’re positive in all those vehicles, we’re positive outside the U.S. where we’ve got good pipeline strength.
And then you take a firm like Putnam. And this is where we’ve talked about this, and I think you see it with Putnam, where the big distribution companies or big distributors are saying they want to consolidate the number of partners. And so you take a Putnam, we’ve actually grown Putnam sales by 30% since the acquisition. And that’s just really, in some cases, where we’re a preferred partner with a distributor, and they weren’t and now they get the benefit of being part of that preferred partnership. It’s where our 350-plus client-facing wholesalers can be out there telling the phenomenal story of the performance of the Putnam’s funds. And so to see a 30% increase in really the first quarter of Putnam because of bringing it together that distribution is really exciting.
So long-winded answer, Craig, but I think we’re — we feel like all that we’ve put together is coming together in distribution now.
Craig Siegenthaler: We’re looking forward to seeing your AI announcement later this week. We have a follow-up on outflows. Over the last 8 quarters, we added it up, Franklin had a $13 billion of all inflows. And I know this excludes realizations too. If we add up Lexington $10 million and Benefit Street $5 million. Combined, they add a $27 billion. So all flows look to have been maybe negative $14 billion excess 2 flagship fundraises. So a similar question, but [indiscernible] on the alts business, how should we think about the [indiscernible] net flow trajectory just given that dynamic?
