Raymond James Financial, Inc. (RJF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. First, I want to welcome everyone to our 46th Annual Institutional Conference here in sunny Orlando, Florida. We really appreciate you all taking time out of your busy schedules to make the trip to Orlando for this great conference. I'm Paul Shoukry, CEO of Raymond James Financial. Butch Oorlog, our CFO of Raymond James will also share some remarks, and we'll open it up for questions at the end of our comments. [Technical Difficulty] Sorry, we're having a little technology issue. It's funny when Paul Reilly was CEO, the technology worked perfectly. I can use the arrows if this clicker is out of batteries. All right. If it doesn't, we'll use the arrows. Perfect. All right. Back to the regularly scheduled programming. So we're a firm at Raymond James really built on a foundation that Bob James and Tom James built starting in 1962 and really reinforced by Paul Reilly, over the last 15 years, and that foundation is really on financial planning. Bob James started the firm as a financial planning organization to not sell any of our own products. We call that open architecture now, but at the time, it was a really novel concept and is to provide objective financial advice for retirees moving down to Florida. And that foundation is really the core of our values, which is to be client-focused, have a long-term orientation, integrity through the markets and independents where we respect the independence that our advisers and bankers have with their clients. We don't call them our clients. We call them our advisers and bankers clients and respecting that independence that each one of our financial professionals have. Those values and that approach has led to very consistent results since our founding. In fact, 148 consecutive quarters of profitability, we can't find another financial services firm with this sort of track record of consistent profitability which has really resulted in a lot of acknowledgment from rating agencies in the streets. We're A rated by all the major rating agencies, as an example, which is really a testament to our long-term approach, for a firm of our size to have A ratings is really unusual. I stepped in as CEO last week, and I say I have big shoes to fill. In fact, this is a picture of me trying on Paul Reilly's shoes this morning. They're about 2 sizes too big. Just as Tom James' shoes after 40 years of CEOs was a little big for Paul when he took over 15 years ago. But fortunately, Paul will be sticking around as Executive Chair. He's in the room today and will help me with the transition just as Tom James stuck around as Executive Chair to help with the transition 15 years ago. Some of the -- Paul's humble doesn't like to take a lot of credit for it, and he's first to remind us that we're overhead. It's really all of our bankers and financial advisers that produce the results with their clients. But it's really remarkable what we achieved over the last 15 years since Paul became our CEO. Our net revenues, which coincidentally the same month that I started as a firm as an assistant to the Chair, working with Tom James and Paul Reilly is the month that Paul Reilly became our CEO. So it's been a fantastic journey where our net revenues grew from $2.9 billion to $12.8 billion over 4x. Our client assets under administration in the wealth business grew from just under $250 billion to over $1.6 trillion, 6x, and our market cap grew from $3.2 billion to somewhere around $30 billion to $35 billion today. That's a 10x growth in market cap over the last 15 years. So truly remarkable what we accomplished under Paul's leadership as CEO. What gives me confidence in leading the firm as CEO is the great leadership team we have. I say leading a firm of this -- in this industry with all the businesses that we have is truly a team sport. And fortunately, we have a great team leading all of our businesses and functions. I see Jim Bunn is in the room. We promoted Jim to be the President of Capital Markets & Advisory, which includes the business that's represented at this conference today, but also our fixed income, public finance and affordable housing business. Between Jim and Tash Elwyn, Scott Curtis, Steve Raney, all the other leaders across the organization, I'm really fortunate to have a strong team to lead the firm forward. And this is our newly constructed senior leadership team, which includes Steve Hufford as an example that -- and all of these people will be very quick to say that their success is contingent on the great team that they have in place under them as well. So we have a great team to lead the firm going forward. And all of these people other than our new Chief Risk Officer, David Krauss, were internally promoted. So again, a testament to the team that was built under Paul Reilly's leadership as CEO. And the reason that's important is because what truly makes us difference what I opened up with is our values. And this leadership team who has been here most of them 15-, 20-plus years are really have a lot of conviction around our values and live out the values each and every day, which is critical to our ongoing success. So now I'll hand the presentation over to Butch, who will provide some financial remarks before I provide some comments on the outlook, and then we'll take some Q&A. Butch?

Thank you, Paul. Well, as we start the review of our financial performance, building on those core values that Paul mentioned, we first start with -- in our most recent September 30 fiscal year, we reported our fourth consecutive year of record net revenues and record net income. That's a testament to our diverse and complementary businesses. We're able to achieve those record results over very different market environments over those 4 years. As part of that successful performance, we generated a significant amount of capital. So our capital deployment priorities and focus is very important and critical to our long-term success. I am also going to mention and talk for a minute about our track record of producing positive operating leverage in our business and also finish up by talking about our strong and flexible balance sheet, which enables us to achieve all those growth objectives that we mentioned. As it relates to consistent capital priorities, our first capital deployment priority is in organic growth. For Raymond James, organic growth takes the form of investment in our recruiting of financial advisers, building out of teams in our capital markets business, which enables us to grow across our businesses. We also leverage our balance sheet in our bank to provide products and services to our clients, both wealth clients and institutional clients. Our second prioritization framework is with respect to acquisitions. And our filter for acquisitions is that, first, any acquisition opportunity has to be a cultural fit for us. They have to -- we are a financial planning firm at our core. And any target has to reflect client-first values and financial planning or else they're just not going to be a long-term fit for the organization. So cultural fit is the first box. The second filter is for a strategic fit. We're looking for opportunities to grow in markets, provide different product differentiation that will allow us to take our core business and grow. And our last criteria and filter is, of course, economics. And long term, we make investments that will produce long-term value creation for our shareholders. The next focus of our capital deployment is our return of equity to our shareholders. We do that through a consistent common stock dividend. Our dividend payout ratio is 20% to 30% of earnings. And as with the growth in earnings that I mentioned, in our most recent fiscal year, we have increased our dividend by 11% over the fiscal '24 level. We are committed to share repurchases to repurchase common stock dilution from our share-based compensation programs. And then lastly, any opportunistic share repurchases. This slide demonstrates that how we've applied that acquisition criteria over -- since 1999. And what I'd like to point out on this slide is many of our most significant acquisitions were during market environments that were very challenging. And that's a testament to our flexible balance sheet that enables us to be opportunistic at times when our competitors can't. Also like to point out, as Paul mentioned on the slide with the leadership, how many of our leaders on that slide came to us from one of the acquisitions reflected on this table. This slide reflects our capital deployment. Since fiscal '18, we've deployed $4.9 billion in returned capital to our investors, either through dividends or share repurchases. We had significant share repurchases in our last 2 fiscal years. Those were driven from, first, a commitment we had made to repurchase the dilution from one of our fiscal '22 acquisitions and then also a higher level of opportunistic repurchases. With respect to operating leverage, we think about it pretty simply. We seek to grow revenues at a higher rate than we grow expenses. This slide reflects our ability to achieve that. You'll notice a 5-year 10.6% CAGR on net revenue growth and a 14.2% growth, 5-year CAGR on our pretax income, reflecting significant leverage over that time. And we also ended fiscal '24 with a pretax adjusted margin of a strong 21.4%. Lastly, we'll talk about our financial -- our balance sheet, financial strength. We are a bank holding company regulated by the Fed. As such, we have regulatory capital ratios that we must adhere to. As of December 31, '24, our total capital ratio was 25%, which is more than 2x the regulatory level required to be considered well capitalized. We also measure our balance sheet flexibility by our level of liquidity. As of December 31, '24, we had $2.3 billion of corporate cash at the parent, ready to deploy in opportunities in support of our clients. That represents about $1.1 billion in excess liquidity over our conservative liquidity targets. And lastly, I want to point out, Paul mentioned it, our 3 major credit agencies have each provided a strong investment-grade credit ratings and outlook, which provide us flexibility to fund our operations and strategic opportunities looking forward. I'll now turn it back to Paul to talk about our vision.

Thanks, Butch. Yes, a few comments about the future, and then we'll open it up to Q&A. Our vision as a firm is to be the absolute best firm for financial professionals and their clients. And so as I've been spending about 80% of my time traveling around the country since the announcement last year, meeting with a lot of you in this room, one of the most powerful things I hear over and over again is almost with -- oftentimes with tears in people's eyes is the best decision that they've ever made was joining Raymond James. And the biggest regret that they have is they didn't do it 5 years earlier. And that means that we have a really special place here, really special culture where we treat people well and people enjoy working at Raymond James and serving their clients at Raymond James. And so when we had our Board offsite a couple of weeks ago and they're asking how are we going to measure success 5 or 10 years out, the financial metrics, of course, are important. But what's more important is when we go around the country 5 years from now, 10 years from now, our associates, our bankers, our financial advisers, are they still saying the best decision that they've ever made was joining Raymond James and the biggest regret they have as they didn't do it 5 years earlier because if they're still saying that, that means we preserve and strengthen the special culture that we have that makes us so unique in our industry. The way we deliver on that is what we call the best of both, which is having a small firm culture where we treat people well, we treat advisers and bankers like clients and salespeople like clients, and we're just a great place to work. We treat people well. We're people focused. But we couple that with capabilities and a platform that is competitive with the biggest firms in the industry. And having those 2 things is very unique. There's a lot of large firms with great platforms, but increasingly, they're losing that people-focused orientation. So they're not as enjoyable places to work. And conversely, there's a lot of smaller firms with great people-focused orientations, but they don't have the critical mass to continue investing in their platform and to be competitive for the financial professionals and their clients. And so that's how we deliver on the value proposition and doing that with diverse and complementary businesses where we have 4 different businesses. The Private Client Group is our largest; Capital Markets, which is represented at this conference; Asset Management; and Raymond James Bank, and they all work together to provide unique and differentiated solutions and advice to clients across corporate clients, institutional clients as well as individual clients. And so -- and of course, those clients aren't mutually exclusive. Ultimately, corporate executives also become individual clients as well. And that stability with the complementary businesses gives us an opportunity to invest in certain businesses when pure plays don't necessarily have the capacity to make those investments. So for an example, over the last couple of years when industry-wide M&A revenues were down significantly and most of the pure plays were either holding steady or cutting back because of the strength of our wealth business, we were able to continue investing in the capital markets and advisory space, actually adding management direct MD headcount in health care, for example, and other sectors to really strengthen our platform where other firms are having to weaken their platform. So there's a lot of business and client synergy to having all of these diverse and complementary businesses. Technology is a big area of focus, has been for a long time and will continue to be across all of our businesses, actually making a big investment in the equity sales and trading space, for example, as we speak. And so that's an area across all of our businesses where we'll continue to invest heavily. And AI, just last week, we announced a senior leader in our technology organization, Stuart Feld, will become our new Chief AI Officer at Raymond James. And so the management team has a lot of conviction that AI will be a game-changer in our industry and across most industries. But we also have a lot of conviction that it's still too early to know exactly how it will change the game. And so what we're asking Stuart Feld to do is build a function that's effectively a lookout function. We've already integrated AI in certain areas in the back office and middle office, but we're just scratching the surface as an industry on the opportunities that we think will become available over the next few years. And so now we have a dedicated lookout function to evaluating AI opportunities and implementing it in our business. Adviser time is a focus that we have really, it's focused on the Private Client Group business, but also will help our other capital markets asset management business as well. We promoted Bella Allaire to Chief Administrative Officer, and she will be dedicated to business process improvement and figuring out ways to save advisers' time, so they can spend more time serving their clients. That's through implementing technology, reengineering processes, essentially reducing and eliminating in a lot of cases, paper and manual processes. So we have a few areas under pilot now, made great progress. But again, this is something that will be a multiyear effort to really look across all of our processes at Raymond James. Alternative investments expansion. Just last week, again, we announced a new leader for the sort of global all things private equity and alternative investments to our wealth business, Ken Novak, who's been with us for a long time. And we also brought on a new leader who's, I think, in this room that's going to be overseeing our private placement business as well. So alternative investments is a growing area of focus, both for our capital markets business and wealth business. There's a lot of synergy there, and that's an area that we look forward to expanding to serve our clients better over time as well. With that, I want to thank you all again for attending our 46th Annual Institutional Conference. We really appreciate your business and your partnership with Raymond James. And I see a lot of associates in the room. I want to thank all of you for what you do for your clients each and every day. You are really what makes up Raymond James, the associates, the bankers, the researchers, the salespeople in the room. Raymond James is not some building that exists in St. Petersburg. It's all of you that serve your clients and that represent the communities that you live in and that serve the communities that you live in. So I want to thank you for being such great representatives for the firm. So with that, I'll open it up to any questions that you may have. Dan?

[indiscernible].

Thanks, Dan. And for those of you that cannot hear or on the call, the question was how do we view wealth management as an opportunity internationally. He was going back way into history where we highlighted India as an attractive market. Really, our international growth strategy as far as wealth is concerned is Canada and the U.K. And that's where our primary areas of focus are now. The regulatory environment, there's a lot of other attractive wealth markets with long-term great prospects, but the regulatory environment in each market is so different. The customs, the investment philosophies and approach is so different that there's not a lot of synergy in our minds in being in too many markets and being too spread too thinly in wealth. So we're very committed. We have critical mass in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. And from a wealth perspective, that will continue to be our focus. But from an M&A perspective, for example, which is much more both scalable internationally, but also there's more synergy from a cross-border perspective. That's an area that we're growing across Europe, looking even at opportunities in Asia and other places over time. So that's an area that we think that there's a lot more global opportunity.

How is your views on private credit change over time for clients? How are you thinking about that as an asset class?

The question was how is our view on private credit changed for clients and as an asset class. The private credit has played a much larger role, particularly in the private equity space and financing -- helping finance transactions. And about 60% of our M&A revenues come from financial sponsors, private equity firms either on the sell-side or on the buy-side. So it certainly has an impact and influence on our ecosystem. About 6 or 9 months ago, we started a new joint venture, a private credit joint venture, so we can offer private credit financing through a partner in a way that is sort of digestible from a risk perspective to us to our private equity clients and the portfolio companies that they're representing. So it's something that we -- and we also finance private credit providers out of our bank as well through lending capabilities. So we're actively in the space, but we're not always going to compete with the lowest cost providers out there. So there's a lot of competition out there right now. And frankly, pricing has gotten really very competitive, and there's not a lot of stipulations in terms of covenants to maintain, et cetera. So the environment for private credit, I would say, right now is -- and all of lending really is very, very competitive.

[ The wealth advisors sell you to their clients or someone else ] ?

Yes. And the question is do we sell in wealth? Absolutely. We have some very -- last week, actually, we had an alternative investment conference, and I think 1/3 of the tables were private credit providers, household names that is certainly distributed through our wealth clients. But again, we have a very disciplined process and approval committee that approves each product that is distributed through our Private Client Group business.

Are you expecting any changes around strategy or approach as to Paul Reilly, [ who has been a lot of time in professional banking ]?

So the question is around do I expect any changes in strategy or approach to Paul Reilly, who's in the back of the room. So I mean, I've worked with Paul literally since the month I started at Raymond James. And so we don't agree on everything. We have a constructive conversations and discussions. But the one thing we do agree on is that the firm is very well positioned for the future. We're very unique in that each one of our businesses have both critical mass to invest in the businesses and to make the investments necessary to be competitive and to comply with regulations. But at the same time, we have in each one of our businesses, plenty of headroom to continue to [Audio Gap] even be dilutive to their core businesses. And then on the flip side, there's a lot of smaller firms with plenty of headroom to grow doing what they're doing, but they don't have the critical mass to make the investments necessary to be competitive in their businesses. So those are the type of firms that become either consolidation opportunities for us or other firms or private equity over time. So we really have a unique position with our values, the leadership team and our business positioning and the value proposition to continue growing, doing what we're doing. Of course, we're going to continue to evolve, invest in technology and invest in products and invest in talent throughout the organization, but it will be much more of an evolution than a transformation. So with that, I want to thank you all again for coming to the conference, and enjoy the rest of the week.