Denis Coleman: Look, to give you some color on that, I wouldn’t point to any particular discrete item. I would say the revenue generation, the activity was broad-based. But in addition to the consequence of the focus on market share and wallet share that we’ve made across the client franchise over time, we also did see good opportunities to risk intermediate on behalf of clients across geographies, across asset classes. And I would observe that over the course of the quarter, it was just a very benign operating environment. Credit spreads were tightening, equity valuations were going up, and that provides a tailwind to our performance across portions of our Global Banking and Markets business as well. The first quarter is obviously often seasonally strong as well.
So we think we really captured a lot of the opportunity that was presented by both the environment and our client engagement. And as David said, that may not necessarily be the case each and every quarter, particularly in FICC and Equities. So, when we talk about like a Global Banking and Markets segment overall, clearly more upside across banking, but a strong performance across both FICC and Equities in Q1.
Betsy Graseck: Super. That’s really helpful. Thanks for the incremental color there. Just one other follow-up. David, you mentioned you’re able to deliver alts in a unique way to the Wealth platform that you’ve got. Could you just give us a little more color as to what you’re thinking about there that we should understand? Thanks so much.
David Solomon: Sure. I think one of the things that our Wealth Management franchise finds very attractive is, we want an open platform. And so when it comes to alts, we obviously have a very, very broad, very, very deep, very, very unique offering as one of the top five or six alts providers on an integrated basis in the world with our own products, what we’re manufacturing out of our Asset Management business. But in addition, we want an open platform where we deliver them access to alternative solutions and products from all different world-class managers around the world across the spectrum. And so I think that’s a very, very unique offering that very, very affluent people who wealth manage at Goldman Sachs find super attractive and super differentiated.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll go next to Brennan Hawken with UBS.
Brennan Hawken: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So I wanted to ask one on your M&A franchise. So the recovery in announced M&A has been really impressive, but really kind of dominated by strategic, and given your strong franchise among sponsors, I’m curious to get an update about what you’re seeing among that cohort and maybe when you might expect we will see a ramp in announcements from the sponsor side.
David Solomon: Yes. Brennan, that’s — I appreciate that question. And that’s a sharp observation on your part. The sponsor activity is still muted, but I would say it’s definitely picking up. The engagement with sponsors in the quarter was meaningfully improved. And as I’ve said before, sponsors make money both for themselves and for their investors by buying things and selling things. And the level of activity has been incredibly muted. And when you look at the LP community, the LP community is putting a lot of pressure on the financial sponsor community to return more capital and increase the velocity of capital return. And so I do think the pace is going to pick up in the coming quarters. I’d say the activity and interaction and engagement is higher in the first quarter than it was throughout 2023.
But I would say it’s still operating at lower levels. There’s a lot of upside for our business. Our business is very correlated to a pickup in sponsor activity. And so to the degree that it did pick up, that would be a very big tailwind for our business across banking and markets broadly. When I look at our leveraged finance deals book, it’s still operating at historically very, very low levels. We feel fortunate that we’ve got a good amount of capital flexibility. That was to accelerate to deploy which is obviously very accretive and attractive business. We’re not seeing it really accelerate yet, but I think it’s coming. And certainly, the sustained level we’ve had over the — the level we’ve had over the course of the last 12 to 18 months is not sustainable.
It will pick up. It’s just a question of when. And so that is a potential tailwind for our business in future quarters.
Brennan Hawken: Great. Thanks. Thanks for that color, David. I appreciate it. And then another question on alts. So, fundraising looks really good. I know there can be some noise in the revenue. So, just curious about the alts revenue down year-over-year and the AUS only up sort of marginally sequentially. Could you give some color around what was happening in those lines and maybe any potential noise?
Denis Coleman: Sure. Brennan, it’s Denis. So, a couple of things. Obviously, the movement in AUS is a function of how we fundraise, how we deploy, and overall levels. We have had a lot of success fundraising, not just in the last quarter at $14 billion, but now with the whole $265 billion-plus since the original Investor Day. But there is a lag in terms of when some of that capital is put to use and actually moves into AUS. Not all of our funds that are raised are AUS-ing immediately. So I think that is something you can look out for in future periods. And then in terms of some of the sequentials on alts, as David was walking through our platform, our Wealth platform in terms of having Goldman Sachs proprietary funds, also open architecture, and third-party platform, some of the alts fees we generate in raising capital for other managers on our platform, and if we look over the sequential period, we had less by way of placement fees associated with those capital raises in the first quarter than we did in the fourth quarter last year.
