Guardian Capital Group Limited (GCGA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So they closed the doors at the back, and that means that we can start. Good morning, everyone. I now call this Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Guardian Capital Group Limited to order. Allow me to introduce myself to you. I'm the Chairman of the Board of Directors of your corporation, James Anas. With your consent, I will act as Chairman of this meeting. Matthew Turner, our Corporation Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting, and Matt is over there to my right. Also present is George Mavroudis, the President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director of your corporation, who will be making a presentation after the formal part of this meeting, and George is right here. I'm also pleased to introduce the other directors of your corporation who are present: Michael Christodoulou, who is also an Officer of the corporation; Petros Christodoulou; Marilyn De Mara; Harold Hillier, who is Chairman of the Compensation Committee, an important person to know; Edward McDermott, who is Chairman of the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee; Barry Myers, who is Chairman of the Audit Committee; and Hans-Georg Rudloff. Also here today representing KPMG LLP, the corporation's auditor, is Mr. James Loewen at the back there. We shall now proceed with the business of the meeting. If there are any proxies not yet deposited, they should be deposited immediately with the Secretary. Nothing? With the permission of the meeting, I will appoint Louise Waltenbury of Computershare Investor Services to be the Scrutineer of the meeting and would ask her to submit to the Secretary, the report as to share representation at the meeting. Matt, do you have that? Thank you. The report of the scrutineer as to share representation at the meeting is now available, and I would ask the Secretary to read it to the meeting. Matt?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are 6 shareholders in person attending the meeting, representing 3,397 shares, 20 shareholders represented by proxy, representing 2,280,441 shares for a total of 26 total shareholders holding and representing 2,283,838 shares from a total issued and outstanding common shares as at the record date of 2,738,379. That means that the percentage of outstanding shares represented at the meeting is 83.4%.

Okay. Thank you. Notice of this meeting dated March 27, 2025, has been distributed to all of the shareholders of the corporation. An affidavit of mailing of the notice has been filed with us. And since all shareholders have received the notice of meeting and accompanying materials, I would suggest that a motion be made dispensing with the reading of the notice and accompanying materials and they be taken as read.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor of the motion, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the motion carried and direct that the affidavit be filed with the records of the meeting. Service of notice calling the meeting having been duly proved and a quorum being present, and the meeting is regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of the business of the meeting. The previous meeting of shareholders was held on May 10, 2024. And to save time, I suggest that a motion be made dispensing with the reading of the minutes in that meeting and taking -- of that meeting and taking them as read and verified.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the motion carried. I have before me and placed before the meeting, the corporation's Annual Report, including the Consolidated Financial Statements of Guardian Capital Group Ltd. as at December 31, 2024, which were approved by the Board of Directors of the corporation and reported upon by the auditor. The Annual Report and financial statements have been sent to all shareholders of the corporation that requested them and are available on SEDAR+ and the corporation's website. So I would suggest the following resolution: Resolve that the reading of the Annual Report, including the Consolidated Financial Statements of Guardian Capital Group Limited as at December 31, 2024, be dispensed with and that they be taken as having been read in full at this meeting. Could I have a mover and seconder for the resolution?

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Mr. Mavroudis will be making a presentation at the end of the meeting about the corporation's businesses. And they will be -- and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions at that time. Are there any questions or comments regarding the Annual Report at this time? As there are no questions at this time, would all those in favor of the resolution, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the resolution passed. We will now proceed with the election of directors for the ensuing year, and I declare the nominations open.

Mr. Chairman, I nominate the following persons for election as directors of the corporation to be ensured here: James S. Anas, A. Michael Christodoulou, Petros Christodoulou, Marilyn De Mara, Harold W. Hillier, George Mavroudis, Edward T. McDermott, Barry J. Myers, and Hans-Georg Rudloff.

There being no further nominations, I suggest that a motion be made that nominations be closed.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the motion carried. The election of directors is taking place on an individual basis. As such, substantially all of the management proxies received have given instructions that they'd be voted for in favor of the election of each of these nominees as directors of the corporation. Therefore, and since there is no contest for the election of directors, I will request the Secretary cast a single ballot of the meeting for the election of each of the foregoing as directors. The Secretary having done so, I declare the following nominees to be elected as directors of the corporation to hold such office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed: James S. Anas, A. Michael Christodoulou, Petros Christodoulou, Marilyn De Mara, Harold W. Hillier, George Mavroudis, Edward T. McDermott, Barry J. Myers, and Hans-Georg Rudloff. The next item on the agenda is the appointment of the auditor. May I please have a motion to appoint the auditor of the corporation for the ensuing year and to authorize the directors to fix their remuneration.

Mr. Chairman, I move that KPMG, [indiscernible] be appointed as auditors of the company for the ensuring year and that the remuneration be fixed by the directors of the corporation.

Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the motion carried. The last item of business is the ordinary resolution to ratify and approve the amendments to the bylaws of the corporation in the form of Bylaw 77. These amendments will ensure that the corporation's bylaws continue to align with modern corporate governance best practices and the Ontario Business Corporations Act. A summary and full text of Bylaw #77 was appended as Schedule B and C of the Management Information Circular, respectively. If approved by the holders of common shares, Bylaws #77 of the corporation will become effective and repeal all prior bylaws of the corporation upon coming into force. In order to become effective, the ordinary resolution must be passed by a simple majority of the votes cast by the holders of common shares at the meeting. Could I please have a motion to confirm the amendments to the corporation's bylaws in the form of Bylaw #77.

Mr. Chairman, I move that by way of ordinary resolution Bylaw #77 of the corporation as set forth in the Schedule C and as described in corporation's management information circular dated March 27, 2025, hereby ratified and approved. And I move that any director or officer of the corporation is hereby authorized to do all such things and execute all such documents necessary or desirable to carry out the [indiscernible].

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Are there any questions or comments on this resolution? As there are no questions, would all those in favor of the ordinary resolution, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the ordinary resolution passed by the required simple majority. The business of the annual meeting -- of this annual meeting has now been concluded, and I would therefore request that a motion be made to terminate the meeting.

Mr. Chairman, I so move.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. All those in favor, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any? I declare the motion carried. Mr. George Mavroudis, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will now make a presentation about Guardian and its businesses. Following this presentation, there will be a chance for you to ask questions.

Well, that was exciting. And Jim, you failed. 12 minutes. For those of you who may not know, my predecessor late John Christodoulou used to take great pride on how quick you can finish an AGM. And I think the record was, what, 7 minutes, Mike? Something like that. So we're going to be a little bit longer than 7 minutes. But welcome, everyone. Thank you for spending a few minutes to hear a little bit about what we're doing at Guardian. But before I get started, I need to thank a few people. First of all, I'd like to thank the Board's support, not just this past year, but over the last several years. Your guidance, your soft suggestions and recommendations have been always viewed as great wise counsel, and I very much appreciate your commitment to helping us shepherd the firm forward. I also want to thank [indiscernible] [ Vinesh ] and [ Alisa ], like a lot of stuff that happens looks very smooth here, but just to do a corporate annual general meeting and all the other administrative stuff, there's a lot of work behind the scenes, and you guys have worked really hard to make this seamless today. And [ Steve Wren ], you've created great successors to the great work you did for so many years. And then lastly, I just want to thank for everyone that's online joining us today as well to hear a few words from my presentation for the year. I guess one last thanks I'd like to give is, this is the Annual Report for this past year, if you haven't seen it or read it. And there's always a lot of work that goes into preparing this. Thousands of hours of like editing and so forth, and then we produce it and quite often, it sits on the shelf. And -- but I want to give a special shout out this year to the graphics designers in the company that created this and actually give them a lot of credit. If you have a chance to read on the inside cover, I think it says a lot about who we are today. But the cover is the Guardian icon forged in malleable steel, with the smoldering fire within representing our passion for our company, our inherent strength and flexibility to mold and shape the future to our needs, support growth across all our businesses and respond to the transformative forces of our industry. So thanks again for all that work that went into creating this image, which I think we'll get a little bit more mileage of in the course of the next few months. Let me first start by giving you a quick snapshot. Well, before I get started, there's always the -- since we're in the building where the TSX exchange is, it's important that I -- I don't know if this is working all of a sudden. Can we have the next slide? There you go. I may make some future estimates or predictions that might go forward. So this is always a disclaimer to make sure that we're all kept in compliance. So for all the compliance people in the audience, you should be very happy that we made this disclosure. The first slide I wanted to just give everyone was the dashboard. These are some key metrics that you can quickly take scan of and get a sense of what the company is doing financially. On the left-hand side of the slide, there is more a sense of the size of our organization in terms of assets under management and under administration. And then, of course, the market capitalization. We are a public company along with some fair market value of securities and securities and shareholders' equity. If you look at this quickly, you might say some of these numbers look a little bit off because it normally means that your market cap is higher than the book value of your business. And certainly, if the book value is a lot of liquid financial securities, it's kind of odd that we're trading at below our market value. But that is just another example where markets are not always efficient, right? So for those younger analysts that are in the room working, there is a future for fundamental investing, active investing because the markets don't always have it right. On the right-hand side of the graph, we talk about how we are measured and prudent in deploying our capital. We can deploy our capital in a number of different ways, returning money back to shareholders. We can be buying back shares, which effectively is meaning those of us who remain as shareholders own more of the company. And of course, we use sometimes our capital to acquire other businesses. So over the last decade, you can see over $600 million, almost $700 million has been deployed of the capital towards dividend, share buybacks and acquisitions. And we try to make sure that we create a total annualized return that's respectful -- respectable in the marketplace. It's -- over the last 10 years, it's been an annualized return of 11%. But clearly, we're always trying to do better. And I'll touch on each of these metrics a little bit more as I go through my slide. The 2024 financials, it's all in here. So I'm not going to go through in great length, but these are some of the key highlights. And I think what sticks out for 2024 is that we had a huge increase in our revenue year-over-year. That's largely due to the acquisition we made of Sterling in July. And that obviously also caused us a little bit of more expenses as we were integrating and buying the business. So our operating earnings, where we have to expense a lot of these onetime costs, were more muted than our prior year. But you can see the adjusted EBITDA number, which is essentially backing out these onetime costs. Despite all this, I guess, activity and noise, we ended up delivering adjusted EBITDA similar to the prior year. And the other item that I'd like to point out is that last two lines. We made an acquisition and yet, we still managed to protect the balance sheet. Because you can see we still have almost $50 per share in cash and marketable securities. So that's something that we're always weighing. We don't -- we're not looking at betting the whole farm on acquisitions that we make. Yesterday, we announced our first quarter. The results were released. Somewhat similar story in the first quarter as it was for the full year. We've had the benefit of having the Sterling business for the full quarter as we didn't have it in the prior year. So we've had an increase in our revenues, but operating earnings are a little bit depressed because of this continued work that we're doing in terms of trying to integrate the business, plus facing some headwinds. I mean it's not all easy sailing right now in the industry. And so we're working through those challenges. But again, you can see the adjusted EBITDA is when we back out kind of these onetime charges that we don't think are going to be ongoing in the long term, we're managing to develop -- to produce still reasonable cash flows. So some of the three key highlights that we talk about is our revenue, our operating earnings and our adjusted EBITDA. And in this slide, we're trying to depict the three main segments that we currently envision in how we manage the business. We've always had a corporate element to the business where we're managing the balance sheet, and that's depicted by the gold. And then there's the blue part of the graph, which is really the more legacy historical businesses that many of you are familiar with Guardian, which is the Canadian, U.K. and any other offshore businesses that we operate. And then the burgundy color is really representing our growing U.S. business. And I think one thing you can expect to see certainly on the two right circles there is that burgundy color shaded area should become a bigger part of the overall circles that you're seeing there as we have a bigger platform, and we'll speak to that in the coming slides. In the middle of each circle, we have the actual number that occurred in 2024 and below that, the brackets of the prior year. We clearly want to keep making those numbers bigger, right? We have $325 million roughly of revenue last year. We're aiming for much higher this year. And in the meantime, we also want to try and turn those revenues into profits. And so there's a lot of work to go into that. But we're not so focused in the short term about maximizing profits, and that's a theme you're going to hear from me over the next few minutes. We talked about capital allocation, so I'm going to just cover those three areas. Dividends is one of them. And you can see we've been pretty consistent in delivering dividends back to shareholders. The annual growth rate has been about 18% over the last 10 years. And again, this year, we've increased the dividend from $0.37 a quarter to $0.39 a quarter. We've already paid two quarters out. And so the shaded area there is estimating if we continue at the $0.39 quarter, we'll end up paying close to $1.54 for the year versus $1.45 in the prior year. And we endeavor to -- as we increase our free cash flow, to continue increasing our dividend back to shareholders and ensure that they're participating in this improved cash flow that we're generating in the business. The next slide is a slide we talk about share buybacks. And on the right-hand side, we have a graph that sometimes the industry likes to call the X factor. And the X factor is, are you a company that continues to increase steadily your dividends while continue to decrease your share count? Kind of sometimes signals and exhibits a real good quality company because, obviously, it's generating enough cash flow, it's able to buy back in stock, but yet it's increasing its dividends to shareholders. I think we're quite proud of this graph on the right side. And we continue to be buying back shares at a pretty good clip. There is a challenge as we buy shares back, there's fewer and fewer shares outstanding. So there is an issue of whether we would be able to buy at discontinued pace. In the last decade, we bought close to 25% of our shares back. And actually, I joined the company almost 20 years ago. And when I joined, it was 42.5 million shares outstanding. I think what this chart doesn't say, and I think it's very important, is that we've been buying back shares at a regular clip. And importantly, we have not issued one option on the back end. A lot of companies out there buy back shares, and then they're issuing them out as options in the back end without -- diluting the benefits of buying those shares. And at Guardian, we've used other methods to remunerate our employees by going out and buying the stock and holding it in trust. So all these shares we have been buying back have been really accretive to anyone who remains a shareholder at Guardian. It would be great that we don't have to -- we don't see great value in buying back shares because the market appreciates the value that we have to offer to the market and let the market have price discovery that is really more reflective of a fair value of the company. But absent of that, we think it's a prudent allocation of our capital to be buying back stock. Now in the first quarter of 2025, we were silent in the market, but that was really because we had to fill our commitment to the employees. And it took a little longer to do that, and we completed that in the first week of April. And then shortly thereafter, we've bought a few shares. So I think year-to-date, we've bought back 115,000 shares and canceled them. This slide is about allocating to acquisitions. So over the last decade, we've been fairly busy. Increasingly incremental businesses are a bit bigger each time we buy them. We spent about $260 million over this past decade. The biggest one was clearly the one last year. That accounts for almost $100 million or 40% of that allocation. And that may be an indication of our confidence that we've been gaining as we buy businesses to be able to maybe take a bigger step forward in allocating capital towards acquisitions. These acquisitions have created all kinds of opportunities and incremental flexibility. And what we're looking for is to not just buy businesses for the sake of buying them, but hopefully buying businesses that are going to be complementary to what we do and get us to a point where we can actually create more transformational change going forward. There's a lot of work still to come. But you can see there's been quite a bit of activity at a regular pace. And the last item on the capital allocation is, obviously, we're somewhat unique in the marketplace in that we've retained a lot of earnings, and therefore, we've converted that into a very sizable portfolio of securities. It's about $1.2 billion at the end of Q1, which was only slightly less than what was at the end of 2024. On the left side, you can see the overall split of that, about half of it, that blue side is really money that we're investing alongside our own portfolio managers and strategies that we're selling on to other clients. On the left side, it's more or less evenly split between a very long-standing holding that we have in Bank of Montreal shares. And even though we've been -- we've reduced that position 60% over the last decade, it's still, absolute dollar-wise, a fairly substantive number. And then we have still quite a substantive amount of cash or short-term cash less than a year on our balance sheet. And so that certainly is a source of further funding for other activities we want to pursue and growing, either seeding ideas or acquisitions. On the right side, we've tried to blow up -- when we say our own proprietary strategies, what kind of strategies are we investing in? Well, for the most part, they are public market equity or bond strategies. You'll see a growing amount we've allocated to private investments, private assets, $162 million. That's, by and large, two specific strategies. One is our real estate. We launched our real estate business 10 years ago. We put in a lead order to help seed that strategy. The team has done an exceptional job. So that order that we put in and committed to, we've never withdrawn penny from it, but it has grown also quite substantially and produces very good regular income. So that's about 1/3 of that $162 million. And then the balance is largely our efforts towards trying to build a Guardian Smart Infrastructure capability. And Guardian became a lead investor to help acquire the first asset, which many of you heard me talk about, which is in the traffic management space. And so this is why having a balance sheet is important because a lot of these things take not just bright ideas and smart people to come on board, but we actually need real capital to help launch them going forward. And I would expect that in the years to come, we'll be leaning more and more into using our capital to build out other capabilities and supporting strategies. What does our asset management business look like? I know we have business segments that are in the U.S. and in the rest of the world. But collectively, our asset management business is, at the end of Q1, $167 billion. There's a major change that's occurred over the last few years. For many years, I used to write in our shareholder letter that if you were an investor in Guardian, you were like 2x invested on the equity market. Because our balance sheet was largely equity exposure, and then the assets we manage were overwhelmingly equities. And so if the markets were doing tremendously well, you can -- without even looking, you expect Guardian would be doing relatively well. Obviously, if markets were a bit drawn down, we'd be incurring that pain. You look at today's environment, we have over 50% of our assets are in fixed income. And so that's a major pivot. A lot of it has been driven by the acquisition of Sterling. I think it's exciting to have this particular position today versus maybe 5 years ago when rates were 0, if you remember those days, and we may see some of those days come back. But in the near term, rates have normalized and we see fixed income as a significant opportunity to continue to grow our business. But the absolute numbers of all the other asset classes are really substantive. These are really large businesses that we have been able to establish from -- our Canadian domestic business is over $10 billion between the fixed income and Canadian equity exposure. And that's an asset class that has generally had a lot of headwinds, but we're feeling pretty good that we've stayed the course. We showed our commitment to the domestic marketplace, and we're beginning to start to see some new opportunities of growth there. So you never know what the next few years will show for that asset class. We have a substantive private wealth business, almost $11 billion of assets. We can do better. I think our expectation is we will do better. And so that represents over 4,000 individual clients that we have some kind of relationship with, which I think in itself is probably the more valuable number to understand than the actual AUM and AUA. And then, of course, we have a very large representation in equities between global equities and U.S. equities. This is the collective investment engines we have across the globe. And we normally -- I mean, what's important about the equities is that actually also come usually a higher fee paying assets. So we really are focused on protecting what we have and growing this because that is one area where we can expand our margin and our earnings in the equity marketplace. A different way to look at it, the total AUM composition, we talked about it from a manufacturing standpoint. Now we're talking about it from a distribution standpoint. And so this $167 billion, this is generally the allocation of the big buckets that we've had for a few years. I would say maybe 10-plus years ago, most of our business was institutional. But you can see institutional remains a big part. It's over 60% of our assets are coming from institutions. But the retail segment has really grown in that it represents almost 1/3 of our total assets. Now when we talk about retail, we include all elements that touch retail. It includes sub-advisory relationships. It includes wrap accounts. It includes a lot of intermediary retail clients. And that intermediary, I mean, quite often, we're not dealing with the end client. We're working with financial advisers, and therefore, we're not necessarily earning top line retail fees, right? So we're still a wholesaler, even though we're servicing the retail marketplace. We think there's continued growth in that area, but the one area that we're working on is trying to figure out how we can get a little closer to the end client and be able to sell more of our product directly to advisers and be able to earn the higher fee component in that relationship. The other important thing to see from this slide is you can see the business segment between domestic Canada, U.K. and then the U.S., we've got a significant footprint now in the U.S. marketplace, and that's a big theme for us going forward. Last year, you heard me give you an update on what we saw as a 5-year strategic plan. This -- these were the 4 main points at a high level. So I just wanted to give you an update where we are in those 4 key points. We said that look, we have a balance sheet. We want to make sure that balance sheet is protected, preserved and grows. We don't want to like just easily spend it unwisely and not have that financial flexibility. So a year later, we still continue to have a very large balance sheet at $1.2 billion. And we guard this capital incredibly closely. Having said that, I'm well aware that we've got to be careful not being overly conservative. Like there's an element of having to lean in with this balance sheet and really help create more transformational change that can unlock much higher earnings by using that balance sheet. The second strategic point that we made is -- and remember, this strategic plan was kind of designed at the end of 2023. At that point in time, we didn't know about Sterling. We had about $40 million of EBITDA or -- $40 million to $50 million of EBITDA and about $40 million of operating earnings. And we said in 5 years' time, we wish to be able to say that we've doubled our operating earnings and EBITDA. So roughly getting to $100 million of EBITDA by the end of 2028. And we also understood very well that it's not a linear progression to that. Like in order to achieve success down the road, you need to make current expenses and investments and things to help you get to the point where you can unlock those earnings. And so we described the journey to be more likely like a J curve. We're investing heavily. We're not looking to maximize near-term profits, but it is all done with a view that at one point, we need to have an inflection point and be able to unlock these earnings. So the first year -- 2024 is the first year of that 5-year strategic plan. It's more or less gone according to plan. Like you see our earnings are a bit depressed, but we're creating a lot of optionality. And I really believe that target of $100 million EBITDA in 2028 is certainly achievable. If anything, one may argue it may not stretch us far enough. But we won't put more obstacles in front of us before we need to. The third item in the strategic plan was we said in terms of capital allocation, the third and fourth, we want to respect the shareholders and ensure that we're giving back -- capital back to them. So as long as the market continues to be inefficient and doesn't recognize the value that we see, we will be buying back shares. So in 2024 and into 2025 at the end of March, we've bought a total of 659,000 shares. We're down to a collective consolidated voting and nonvoting shares of roughly 24.5 million shares. So -- just so that you're not confused. You may have heard the administrative aspect of the AGM that there were like 2.75 million shares available to vote. Those are just the voting shares, right? We have another 22-plus million shares that are nonvoting shares. The economics are the same for all shareholders. So just to make sure no one is confused by that element. And then of course, we're looking at -- as we increase our cash flow to increase our payout ratio and pay out more in dividends to our investors. In the last slide I want to just -- before I go in to talk about a bit more of the future and the excitement we still have for Guardian is you heard a lot about us buying a business in the U.S., our increased U.S. exposure. This is definitely something very new for us in the last year. Like the size of our U.S. segment is very significant. We have a very significant position to build off of. In the U.S., we have USD 88 billion under management, over CAD 120 billion represented by U.S. operating businesses. There's enormous opportunity to improve efficiencies by trying to integrate. So there's a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, trying to improve, melding these companies together and working as more like one group. And as a result, the EBITDA contribution is rather muted still. Like last year was $1 million. When you adjust for the transitional costs for 6 months, having Sterling, we delivered about $11 million of EBITDA in the U.S. But we obviously are doing this with bigger aspirations. And that's where we think we can create transformational change. So that's a lot of what's happened in 2024 in the first quarter. I want to spend just the next 5 minutes or so to share with you some things that we think should give people excitement for Guardian, whether you're a shareholder or whether you're an employee, why would one remain excited about our journey that we have in front of us? So on the next slide, in order to have this excitement, there are a few attributes that are not new. These have been kind of ones we've lived by over the last number of years. But that balance sheet is incredibly important in order to invest and support in innovation and in patience to build out businesses. And that balance sheet has allowed Guardian historically and we see that today in our current array of offerings, an effort to consistently invest for future growth by seeding new ideas. So some of these ideas are very much still in the infancy. Some of them are incrementally contributing. And what we're really trying to do is get them all to incrementally contribute. But ideally, we want to find a few transformational wins in that process. And we have embraced the benefit of having a diversified business and not being stuck in one style or one process or one asset class. I think that has served us well in terms of longevity because markets change. Investors' interest and attitudes towards different asset classes are always evolving. And so therefore, if you're not also experimenting with change in the marketplace, you do run the risk that you become irrelevant. And I think that's something that in the last number of years at Guardian, we should be proud that we've remained relevant. It doesn't mean we've succeeded, but we've remained relevant. And I look at a lot of our peers, certainly in Canada who weren't willing to invest in the future, they're facing a situation much more dire because the optionality for them doesn't exist, right? And so we see across the firm several levers of opportunity. If anything, you can argue that maybe we have too many levers, and we need to provide some focus on some things. But I'd rather have as many levers as we have right now for future success. And the list is long. So I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm going to pick on a few of them in a few seconds, but we've got a great quantitative team that is doing incredible work using AI as part of their investment process. We have an emerging private infrastructure business that takes a long time to build. In yesterday's quarterly, we did make it very clear we're not going into this expecting outsized wins over the near term. We're seeding ideas and capabilities and track record that we think will likely contribute meaningfully in 5, 10 years out. And so you have to have that patience to pay for the future success. And the list -- our private wealth business has many opportunities across the various segments we operate in. But I want to just spend maybe a few minutes on 3 or 4, like if you want to summarize some really incredibly new or transformative opportunities we have in front of us. The first one is our current U.S. fixed income exposure that we've backed into, we bought with Sterling, whatever, and through Agincourt that we had, this is a very meaningful platform that we have now in the U.S. In aggregate, we have over USD 65 billion under management. This is a good size. It's not with the giants of the marketplace. But this asset class is a very large asset class. I'm not sure if it's right because I used ChatGPT and it could be wrong. But I think it's $47 trillion market size in U.S. public fixed income securities traded. There are some very big players that manage trillions of dollars in fixed income. We have over 40 investment professionals. The platform has been built. It has been built to serve a lot more assets under management than what we currently manage. So the vision is, look, I think we can easily double this AUM, and we're not being unrealistic with the opportunity set in the marketplace. If anything, people may have criticism that I'm asking for a low bar. But if you take that $60 billion, $65 billion of additional assets, we think we can go out there and win in the marketplace with the various distribution channels that we operate in. Even at a lower margin fee you start doing the back-of-the-envelope calculations, and you can start seeing transformational opportunities to expand our earnings. So that's one area that we're very focused on, and we need to continue developing product and vehicles to unlock this potential. The second area that I want to bring to everyone's attention, we touched upon it very briefly, but retail distribution for us, both in Canada and the U.S. I think people, if they don't follow the Guardian story, would be very surprised when they would hear from me that we have over $50 billion of assets that are in some shape or form, retail. As I mentioned earlier, the drawback is that too much of that $50 billion is intermediary, low fee, wholesale, but that's okay. We like that business. We think we can build on it. But what we really want to do is how do we figure out ways to add to this existing book of business by having a bit more successful products into the retail market with financial advisers, where we can grab a higher fee component. So here in Canada, in the last 4 or 5 years, we've been putting down the foundation to reenter really more with our own funds and ETFs in the marketplace. We're already in the SMA wrap channel. It's been a long slog, like, it hasn't been easy. And I think at the end of the year, we had counted something like $1.5 billion of new assets we've been able to gather in funds or ETFs from this initiative. We did not set out to build this to just achieve $1.5 billion. We think a very achievable bar is look at seeing if we can raise $10 billion of assets in this retail effort. And when you look at the average fee you can earn, again, that could start fueling a different level of profitability that we don't see in our business today, but very achievable. Same thing in the U.S. The U.S., people are surprised when I tell them now that we have all these collective businesses. We have $38 billion in some kind of retail client exposure. And we're working on things like trying to update our mutual fund family. We're very proud that our team has worked so hard behind the scenes with some strategic partners. We launched the first active ETF for the firm in the U.S. run by Sterling, total return bond fund strategy. It was launched at the end of March. And in one month, that fund is now USD 400 million under management and one of the top 10 or 15 active ETFs in the U.S. These are the things that if we can execute better, demonstrate what kind of opportunity upside we have in building the business. So retail for me, is really an important uptick. And that's not to take away from our institutional endeavors. Like we have a very big institutional book of business. We want to win institutionally. We think we can continue winning institutionally, but this retail business has another level of transformational earning potential. Technology. I think many of you have heard, it's probably the one thing that keeps me up at night, thinking about all the technology spend. Technology spend seems to never end. People want more technology. Just want to make sure technology ends up making us a bit more efficient at some point, too. But what's really important to understand here is -- and you can read all kinds of industry material prognosis of the future. Technology is the bane of every organization today in our industry, maybe across many industries. But in order to make the investments necessary so that you can remain relevant with the times, relevant to what clients expect us to have in terms of technology, actually, even more importantly, when we recruit new people into the organization that have come from larger organizations, they expect us to not be doing things on the back of like a piece of paper and a pencil, but actually having the proper technology. So the size of our firm and what we've been able to kind of scale allows us the ability to afford to make these investments. But they're expensive. And so we're making them because we believe we're going to grow into the capabilities that we're building. And eventually, the average technology spend will end up being spread over a larger book of business. But technology, I think, is one of those items that a lot of peers that if they don't have the capabilities, they don't have the resources, they don't have the commitment, it may determine whether they stay in the business or just sell out of the business. I'm going to go back one. So the other thing, and this has been something that has, for Guardian, been -- ever since its inception in 1962, it's always been an innovator of products. I mean, at our core, we've always been money managers, manufacturers. We like investing. Our founders were committed to investing. They love the game of investing. And frankly, distribution was kind of more of an afterthought, which you could see even in our current DNA, it still remains to be something we need to work on and improve on. But this innovative product capability is what builds products for the future that might be more successful than what you see today in our financials. We have 80 unique strategies in our organization. That's a lot of product. Some product is maybe not going to work out. Some of it is just kind of treading along. Some of it's working very well. But within that mix of 80, there will be others in the future that we're going to be seeding as well. And it's there where we're looking to discover some transformational wins. GuardCap with our global equity strategy was one of those 80 10 years ago, and it was muddling around with just our seed money and then it became a very big success. We need more of those transformational wins going forward in order to meet our objectives that we have. And then I'll just conclude with the last item in terms of why you should be excited about our future. And that is again, back to the balance sheet. I hate harping on that, but a lot of what we talk about and what we want to do is really just words if we don't have the financial means to actually back it up. And I think Guardian is in a unique place, where it can back it up. And I joined the company just shy of 20 years ago, and I joined at a time when it had only $10 billion under management. It had $300 million on its balance sheet. And one might argue, if you took it at its face, it didn't look like it was all that exciting and where it was going to go given its asset class and stuff. But I took a bet that actually this has got great opportunity. We've got the financial means. And if you've got the right people, we can work within the industry and figure it all out and be much more successful. And here we stand 20 years later and actually, the same narrative can be said today. Like, well, you're kind of in the public market domain, you're not in the exciting alternatives. You're not in the passive market where all the money is going. Yet I remain extremely excited. We got an incredible platform. We have more wealth than we -- more financial wherewithal than we've ever had. And we operate in an industry that is tremendously still attractive. I think the latest survey I saw was something like the asset management industry is nearly $130 trillion in size. That's a big market. And so there's room for us to figure out ways to build on the business. And I remain as excited as I was 20 years ago in joining Guardian that the next decade holds an immense amount of opportunity. Now it's funny, as I prepare for these things, I do my own homework to see what others are saying, and others say the same thing, right? So what does it mean at the end of the day? It actually comes down to execution. Execution, it comes down to the people. We have to have people who are passionate, who believe in the opportunity set, who are willing to climb against all headwinds to achieve greater success. And that's, I think, what's going to determine whether we're going to be more successful over those who think the same thing as us. And I believe that we'll get there. So on that, why don't I end the meeting -- or end the period of my presentation, and take any questions that might be out there. There's not usually too many questions, so it could be pretty short, but...

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Yes. I mean the issue of substantive issuer bid has been brought to my attention on a regular basis. And we haven't dismissed that option. But one of the challenges we're weighing is that we're having a tough time finding shares as it is. We're not really sure, other than messaging to the market in a more loud or a clearer way, that we believe in the stock price that we actually will be able to buy a lot more shares. But I think if the discount continues to widen, I think it makes it much more compelling to do a substantive issuer bid. So what I will tell you is that we are aligned and believing that we should be buying a lot more shares at these prices. Whether we use a substantive issuer or bid or not, I think it remains to be seen. And the market, as I started off my presentation, is evidence of how much it can be inefficient. And -- but also, I realize that the reality is what the perception might be out there. So we need to figure out ways to unlock that value. I mean, I've heard the same stuff 15 years ago, we were kind of like trending at $10 a share. And we could have -- people were like concerned that we were flatlining. I believe we will find ways to unlock tremendous value with our strategic plan, and it may include a substantive issuer bid along the way. Any other questions? I don't have any other questions online either. So -- well, some of us will still be around after the meeting. So happy to take anybody's questions if they want to come up in person. But thank you for taking the time to hear us out today. And hopefully, we'll be looking at a path that continues to climb up to the right. Thank you.