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

Right. We might be a minute or so early. But we'll just go ahead and get started. First of all, thank you all for coming. Good afternoon. I'm Kristie Waugh, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and welcome to Raymond James Financial's 2025 Analyst and Investor Day. We're happy that so many of you were able to join in person here in our corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg. We do really value that you're taking the time out of your day to travel down here and spend the afternoon and part of the evening as well. So thank you for that. Additionally, we know we have many more listening via the webcast. And so thank you again as well for your interest and following Raymond James. Over the next few hours, you will hear directly from leaders across the firm, who will provide insights into our long-term strategy as well as key strategic initiatives across the firm. We have a lot planned, so let's go ahead and just get started. And you wouldn't see me if I don't have to go through the forward-looking statements. So first, I'll call your attention to the safe harbor statement shown on the screen. Certain statements made during this presentation may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, information concerning future strategic objectives, business prospects, financial results, anticipated timing and benefits of our acquisitions, anticipated results of litigation and regulatory developments or general economic conditions. In addition, words such as believes, expects, plans, will, could and would as well as any other statement that necessarily depends on forward future events are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. Please note that there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from those expressed in these statements. We urge you to consider the risks described in our most recent Form 10-K and subsequent 10-Q which are available on our Investor Relations website. We will also use certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide information pertinent to our management's view of ongoing business performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures may be found in the appendix of this presentation. Now turning to the agenda. In a minute, CEO, Paul Shoukry will join us and kick things off with a strategic review. Following Paul, we'll have Tash Elwyn join us to review our largest business, Private Client Group; and Steve Raney will discuss our bank segment. At that point, we will take a short 15-minute break. And when we resume Jim Bunn will join us to review the businesses within our Capital Markets segment and Butch Oorlog will provide a financial review. Finally, we'll be joined by Vin Campagnoli; and Andy Zolper to review our technology. The presentation today has been made available on our Investor Relations website biographies as well as those non-GAAP reconciliations can be found in the appendix. We will have Q&A after each presenter. So for those of you in the room, I just ask that you please just wait to be recognized and then please name yourself, your firm before stating your question. All right. With that, I do want to introduce Paul Shoukry. Paul became CEO earlier this year, and he's currently in addition to CEO, he's also a Director on the Board. He previously did serve as Raymond James President from 2024 to '25 in anticipation of taking over as CEO, and he served as the firm's CFO from 2020 to 2024. Please welcome Paul Shoukry.

Thanks, Kristie. Good afternoon. Thanks for making the trip down to Florida, spend a half day with us and have dinner tonight. We're looking forward to spending more time with you and sharing, providing strategic update. Our goal, as you see on this slide, is quite simple, is to be the absolute best firm for financial professionals and their clients. And their clients is really important and really applies across all of our businesses. It's not just true for our independent business in PCG. It's true for the employee advisers as well. And that we respect that they own the relationships with their clients. We treat all of our financial professionals like free agents. And so the way we measure our success, the way we make decisions is to financial professionals feel like Raymond James is a special place. Do they want to be here? And that has really been driving our leading growth in the industry, both from a recruiting perspective and a retention perspective, not just in the wealth business and the Private Client Group business, but in the capital markets business, asset management business and the bank as well. I take over as CEO with very big shoes to fill. Paul Reilly is in the room, our Executive Chair, and this is a look at what we did as a firm over the 15 years that he was a CEO, which happens coincidentally to be the month that I joined the firm back 15 years ago as well. Really remarkable growth, and Paul is the first to remind us, this is not because of us. We're just corporate overhead. This is really due to the success of all of our financial professionals and their clients, started 15 years ago with a little less than $250 billion of client assets. Now it's over $1.6 trillion representing about 14% a year, steady growth over that period. Net revenues was less than $3 billion. We're just around $13 billion last year, representing 11% growth in the market cap. We were about $3 billion market cap 15 years ago. As of today, we're about $28 billion or $29 billion representing during this period of 16% per year growth rate. So really successful 15-year period, and that is really driven by the values of the organization. We always put clients and we include financial professional, financial advisers as clients, we put them first. A lot of firms say this, but I'd say the proof is in the pudding, it really permeates through every decision we make, strategic decisions, tactical decisions, big decisions, small decisions. Every single meeting, we always start off with how is this going to impact the client? Is this the best thing to do for clients? And if we do well by clients, if we do well for clients, then the success for shareholders will follow. And that's a very different approach than some firms in our industry take. We always put clients first. And we always make decisions for the long term. That's another key value of the firm, we know there's a lot of short-term levers that can increase results next quarter or the following quarter. But we always look at -- we're pulling those levers give us the best opportunity to serve financial professionals and their clients and our shareholders over the long term. And we always pick the long term over the short term. We're focused on what's going to happen over the next 5, 10 years and beyond. Frankly, we could care less about what's going to happen in the next quarter or 2. That's meaningful, but not important to the long-term success of the company. We value independence across the entire firm. We want all of financial professionals and associates to feel a sense of ownership at the firm that they want to drive growth for the firm. They feel like they have accountability and ability to influence decisions and make the firm a better place for the financial professionals and clients. And importantly, we act with integrity. A lot of noise out there. We're 15 years into a bull market. There's been things that we've been -- people have been asking us to do in that period of time when rates were near 0, certainly, we were criticized a lot for not taking more leverage on the balance sheet, taking more duration on the balance sheet. As an example, and we always say, you know what, we're acting with integrity no matter where we are in the market cycle, no matter what kind of pressure we're getting from the outside, no matter what our competitors are doing, we keep these values front and center, and we always act with putting the clients first, making decisions for the long term and valuing independence. And that has led to 149 consecutive quarters of profitability. We can't find any other firm in the financial services space that we compete in that can say this, even through the financial crisis, we didn't take TARP money. We were able to stay in on our own 2 feet. In fact, since 1983, the only time we lost -- we had a losing quarter was 1987 Black Monday when all of our competitors shut down their trading desk because they are losing money. And Tom James said, no, we have to keep our trading desk open because we have to serve clients when they need us the most. I think we lost $100,000 that quarter. Beyond that, we've been profitable every single quarter in the financial services industry, a volatile industry. We've been profitable every single quarter since going public in 1983. We have a very diversified business profile anchored with the Private Client Group business, which represents about 70% of our revenues, but complemented with the Capital Markets, Asset Management and bank segment. We'll get into this more later, but all of these businesses have both critical mass to be competitive in their spaces, but also plenty of headroom to grow, continuing to do what they do. And within each one of these businesses, we have a lot of diversification. So for the Private Client Group business, for example, we have an independent channel. We have an employee channel. We have an RIA channel and multiple affiliation options. A lot of other firms are talking about entering those spaces and having multiple affiliation options but we're one of the few that actually have scale in all of those affiliation options with continued plenty of headroom to continue growing in each one of those affiliation options. So we believe at Raymond James, we have the largest addressable market in the wealth space. And that's true. That diversification holds true in capital markets as well. Jim Bunn will get into both the equity side, fixed income and the affordable housing business that we have there as well as the bank and the asset management segment. I want to take a second to really focus on financial strength. I know we show this slide a lot. But I think it's particularly important as we're 15 years into a bull market. It's really been 15 years since the financial crisis and since the last time we saw a prolonged downturn. COVID was somewhat of a downturn. But fortunately, a lot of aid came to support the economy and the markets came back pretty quickly during COVID, as you may recall, but I think it's important to focus on as we were starting to get questions even from financial advisers and financial professionals they're starting to look at balance sheets again. They want to make sure that the firm that they entrust their clients' assets where there's a custodian, as a broker-dealer, as a partner has a strong balance sheet. And so fortunately, we do have a strong balance sheet. We have a total capital ratio of 25%. The regulatory requirement is 10% to be well capitalized. Butch will talk about how we plan on using that capital going forward because we -- even our 10% Tier 1 leverage target, we're at over 13% now. So we have about $2.5 billion of excess capital above our conservative target. So we know that, and we have plans to address that. And we have corporate cash of $2.5 billion. We have a target of just over $1 billion. So we don't have as much excess cash as we have excess capital but we have plenty of debt capacity to raise cash to match that up over time if we find the good growth opportunities. And our credit ratings are a, with all the major rating agencies, A level ratings with all the major rating agencies which is really unique for a firm of our size and again, a testament to our conservative balance sheet and business practices and long-term consistent -- relatively consistent performance. With private equity entering our space, and even a lot of the strategics, particularly on the independent side, they're coming in with extremely aggressive balance sheets. Financial advisers are starting to ask us about it. They're looking at firms, both private equity backed and/or even some of the public firms, particularly in the independent side, they're saying these firms don't even have positive tangible equity. Some of these firms, if you take their assets minus liabilities, their equity and you subtract out the intangible assets that really don't have a liquid value or liquid net worth of goodwill and intangibles they're running on negative tangible equity. And financial advisers are concerned about that. Some of them are asking, we want to join a firm that has positive. We have $10 billion of positive tangible equity, and they want a firm that they can trust could withstand a downturn and be opportunistic and still front-footed at a prolonged downturn, not that they're calling a cycle in the market. But 15 years into a bull market, it's something that they're increasingly focused on. We have over $12 billion of total equity, both tangible and intangible, and we have $2 billion of senior notes, just over $2 billion of senior notes. Again, some of these are the firms, whether they're private equity backed or even some of the public firms, it's just they have a fraction of the equity that we have in multiples of the debt. And again, those financial advisers a lot of them coming from the independent side are saying, we want to be associated and affiliated with a firm that has a lot more equity than debt and not the other way around. And so that is something that is becoming increasingly a competitive advantage in this 15-year bull market is the financial strength and profile. And for the firms that don't have that, it's increasingly becoming a headwind strategically for those firms. So in addition to the robust technology products and platform, balance sheet is really becoming a true competitive advantage, more so than it has probably in the last 5 to 7 years. Our value proposition is we want to be the best of both, the best of both worlds. What does that mean? It means to have the scale, the capabilities, the technology, the alternative investments, AI, which Andy Zolper and Vin will talk about here shortly. All of the things that a vast majority of our advisers that we recruit come from the largest firms in the industry, and they're used to having in-house bank to the extent that they want to make jumbo mortgages to their clients and in-house trust company, if their clients need to have trust needs, all of the alternative investment products, in-house insurance capability to provide -- open architecture to provide outside insurance. And so we have to have the capabilities, the technologies, the products, the expertise in-house to be competitive with the largest firms in the industry but we also want to provide a culture that's family-friendly, that people are excited to be affiliated with. They enjoy the people that they're interacting with, and that's really the best of both world value proposition, which really resonates in each one of our businesses. It's not unique to just the Wealth Management business. It's true in capital markets, asset management and the bank as well. I've been spending about 80% of my time over the last year traveling across the country, meeting with many financial advisers, clients, bankers that I can possibly meet with. And the thing that I hear consistently and I've shared this before, in the public domain is oftentimes emotionally with tears in their eyes, in this particular case, you see Tammy sitting there. When I was at our branch in Nashville, they were saying the best decision I ever made was affiliating with Raymond James 5 years ago, and the biggest regret I have is we didn't do it 2 or 3 years earlier. I hear that consistently. We are at our independent conference in Orlando about a month ago with 3,000 advisers, and we had some prospects there from other firms. And the number of times I heard our existing advisers telling the prospects what are you waiting for? You can't affiliate with Raymond James quick enough. I was where you were at. And I thought it was okay. I thought it was decent, but the products, the services, and most importantly, the culture and the people here are unrivaled at your current firm. And that's music to our ears. When the Board asks us at our off-site in February, how are we going to measure success 10 years from now? What financial metrics are we going to track? What initiatives are we going to track? I said, we'll have all of that. The one thing we know about financial projections, as you all know, is they're wrong, almost a second you're done with them. But what we know we can track and what will be the biggest success factor for the firm is when we travel around the country 10 years from now, are people still saying with tears in their eyes, the best decision they ever made was affiliating with Raymond James and the biggest regret they have is they didn't do it 3 years earlier. Because if that's still happening 10 years from now, that means we preserve the special culture at Raymond James that differentiates us in this highly competitive industry. And so that's how we're measuring ourselves. We actually created videos. This is from a video that we're creating to capture that sentiment and to hold ourselves accountable to that sentiment going forward. This is our strategy going forward through 2030, and you'll hear elements, more specific elements of the strategy from each one of the speakers today. But first, it's to increase our market share in each one of our businesses. Again, we have critical mass in each one of the businesses and continued headroom to grow. We'll talk about that a lot more throughout the day. To increase collaboration in each one of our businesses, to help our financial professionals differentiate themselves with their clients by providing deeper and broader financial advice. And you'll hear examples of -- specific examples of that today as well. Invest in tools and resources, that platform that I talked about that's so critical to be competitive. We're investing almost $1 billion in technology. Most of that's in wealth management. It's very hard for smaller firms to compete with that. A lot of them lose their independence because they can't compete with that. They don't have the scale that's necessary to provide competitive technology offerings and then enhancing the infrastructure. There's one thing that keeps me awake at night is cybersecurity and it's fraud. And that's the thing that I hate seeing the most is when a client gets defrauded. And so those are the kind of things Andy and Vin will talk about later, and I think there will be a tour at the end of the day of our cyber control center, which is just phenomenal. But again, we can never rest on our success there because the criminals are moving so quickly. So we're always paranoid about where and how the next threat will come. And we do that all with a very strong leadership team. People always ask me coming into the CEO role, I must be overwhelmed. And oftentimes, I am, but what gives me comfort is knowing that leading a firm is a team sport. It's not just about one person. And I am so fortunate to have a fantastic leadership team, many of which you'll hear from today that are leading their respective businesses and functions. And they have a very strong leadership team. This is our senior leadership team. And everyone on these 2 pages with the exception of our Chief Risk Officer, David, who's here today, were internal promotions. And that's so critical for us, and I thank Paul for that every day in terms of being able to -- he built a bench of very talented leaders not just at the top levels, but throughout the organization, he focused on succession planning and having that continuity is so critical because I said our culture and values is what makes us different. Well, the only way we can reinforce that and continuing that over time is if we have leaders in across the entire organization who've been here for a long time, really buy into the culture and the values and the way we treat people and do things at Raymond James. So we have a fantastic leadership team. In terms of expanding our market share across all businesses, this is one example that's particularly relevant in wealth. And Tash will get more into this, is growing in the Northeast and out west, where our market share is much lower than our national average. So we have significant opportunity in the 2 wealthiest markets in the country. That will help us continue to grow for years to come. This map would look different, for example, that Jim will talk about in investment banking, we have a significant opportunity to continue expanding in Europe, in France, for example. And so we have plenty of opportunity geographically to continue gaining market share in each one of our businesses. Really important. I want to take a second to talk about the importance. Again, 15 years into a bull market, I think this is really critical. The importance of sustainable growth versus growth at all cost. Our strategy is to pursue sustainable growth. We have a quality over quantity strategy when it comes to the number of financial advisers, you saw the asset growth and the revenue growth over the last 15 years. The adviser count during that period was low single digit. Because we're bringing on and recruiting advisers with much higher productivity than the advisers that are retiring or that are leaving the business. And so that quality over quantity approach which is true for both our employee side of the business, but also the independent side of the business, which, again, is extremely unique in the independent side of the business where many of those firms have a quantity over quality strategy where their average production is a fraction of the average production that we have in the independent side of the business because to them, they just want to get more throughput through the system. We don't look at it as our advisers as throughput. We look at them as full-time professional advisers providing exceptional advice to their clients, and we want to be able to have a high-touch model that supports those advisers enabled and supported with technology as well. And so it's easy in our business to buy growth. In fact, in absence of a value proposition, what do you do, you pay more upfront and you have higher payouts to bring on growth. And again, 15 years into a bull market, you can do a lot of adjustments to show The Street adjusted earnings and adjusted EBITDA and all these other things that The Street buys 15 years into the bull market more so than they would maybe 15 years ago, after a downturn. And so our focus is on sustainable, long-term profitable growth and having quality over quantity, and that's very unique, particularly on the independent side of the business. Collaboration. Focus on collaboration is so critical to providing financial advisers. The #1 thing I hear from financial advisers is that our clients are expecting more from us. They want more holistic advice. It's not just about investments anymore. It's about all aspects of assets, liability management, insurance management, estate planning. And so we have to be able to bring the entire firm to the financial professionals so they can provide that differentiated and deep advice to their clients. You'll hear throughout today the leaders talk about how they're doing that, how they're working together. I'd say they're working together exceptionally well and figuring out how can we help financial professionals provide broader and deeper advice to their clients. The bank segment is just one example. Steve will talk about it, jumbo mortgages, securities-based loans. We have a trust company internally. All those things. A lot of our financial advisers say, I don't want to be a full-time lender. I don't want to sell mortgages to each one of my clients. But if I have a high net worth client that comes in and wants a competitive jumbo mortgage in 30 days, I want to be able to offer it here at Raymond James. I don't want to have to go send them to another bank because that other bank is going to put a financial adviser on that client if we do that. And so having a full service platform, again, both on the employee side of the business, independent contractor side of the business, is so critical to the higher net worth adviser-focused advisers. Investment tools and resources, I talked about almost $1 billion in technology. One area we're very focused on that you'll hear more about later is artificial intelligence. About 3 months ago, we announced a newly created role and filled a newly created role called the Chief AI Officer, and they already have a lot of exciting things. I won't steal Vin and Andy's thunder, but a lot of exciting things really with a focus on 3 things: one, increasing efficiencies for both the firm and financial professionals so they have more scale in the business, and so we have more scale as a firm; two, data-driven insights so we can help find unique opportunities and bespoke opportunities in a more scalable way to provide financial advice that's tailored and bespoke to financial professionals and their clients; and three, to support the security and infrastructure of the firm. So cybersecurity, for example, where 10 years ago, 5, 10 years ago, a lot of the false positives were manually checked by humans, now AI can do a lot of that to help protect the firm in a fraction of the time that it used to take for a human to check on those false positives. Adviser times another important initiative that we rolled out. We literally have a team that's going to branches and watching how they spend time during the day, both the advisers and sales assistance. And doing process flows of where are they losing efficiencies in their day that take away from being able to spend more time with clients. So we're automating things. We're getting rid of paperwork. We're getting to e-signature wherever we possibly can. And this has been just in the 12 weeks since it's rolled out a huge hit with financial advisers because we go to their branches, we monitor how they're spending time. And literally, as soon as 8 weeks later, they see improvements that reduce the amount of time they're spending on certain steps in the process. And then enhancing the infrastructure, we talked about the cybersecurity and the infrastructure of the platform, where we have to -- I mean, there's a huge surge in volatility following Liberation Day and huge surge in trade volumes, we have to be able to handle those surges for clients, right? They don't want to see an error message saying, sorry, your systems are down. And so that infrastructure and knock on wood, our platform stayed open during that entire period of increased volatility. So those are the kind of things that we have to make sure we're putting ample investments in not just to handle client activity during normal days but during the surge days that we know come from time to time. M&A. I'll just say there's been a couple of large M&A transactions in the wealth space over the last year. For M&A, for us, we've always said that it has to be a good cultural fit because we're in the people business, if it's not a good cultural fit, no matter how great the business is, it's not going to work long term. So cultural fit and the alignment of values that I talked about earlier is absolutely critical. Only then do we look at the strategic fit where 1 plus 1 gives us a chance of being something greater than 2. We don't want to get bigger just for the sake of getting bigger. We want to get -- we want to do an acquisition to get better to make Raymond James better and to make the firm that we bring on better. Those are the best marriages that we've seen and that we've experienced in our business. And then only then do we look at the financials and it has to make sense for the firm and for shareholders using reasonable assumptions. And it is particularly disappointing because there's such a few opportunities in our space that are good cultural fits and strategic fits. So I will say personally and for the company, it's very disappointing when it checks those first 2 boxes in either private equity or strategics that are even more competitive in private equity bid on an asset to a point where we can't compete. And so -- but again, 15 years in the bull market with valuations where they are, with the amount of leverage based acquisitions that are out there, that happens from time to time, but we're not going to do a deal just to do a deal. It has to make sense for shareholders. We don't want to get bigger and do something that's flashy. Even in the short term, if it's applauded by The Street and by the investment community, if it's not going to put us in a good position in the long term, we're willing to turn it down as painful as that might be. RJ 2030, this is simply that by 2030, we want to exceed $20 billion in revenues, and we put plans in place and we'll share with you today that give us confidence that we can get there. And we can actually exceed that $20 billion revenue target by 2030. So to recap, we'll continue to run this firm under our collective leadership that I showed you on the pages prior. Driven by our values and based on the values that Bob James, Tom, James built and was reinforced by Paul Reilly. All of our businesses have critical mass to be competitive in their space to make the investments necessary to be competitive but also continued headroom to continue growing in our core businesses and our financial strength and balance sheet not only provides us the strength and stability in any kind of market environment, but it's also increasingly in a 15-year bull market becoming more of a competitive advantage than it has been since maybe the financial crisis. So with that, I want to thank you again for attending our Analyst Investor Day.

I'll open it up to questions. Devin?

I guess maybe on the M&A side, where you just left off you talk about, obviously, there's been some deals, but at the same time, it seems like there's going to be a lot of advisers potentially in motion or at least willing to have a conversation. So can you talk about what you're seeing there just based on all the consolidation? And then interrelated, we're also hearing about some of these private equity firms actually further increasing their recruiting packages. So what you guys are seeing in the market there? Just how important economic packages for advisers relative to some of the other things you talked about beginning around culture and balance sheet strength and other products being kind of what gets you guys over the edge. I'd love to just get thoughts on those.

Great questions. I would say from the financial aspect, where private equity is getting more aggressive. And if you step back and think about what's going on in private equity and wealth, it's actually really unique. I was speaking to Tom James about it last week, and we can't think of an industry that's gone through a roll-up strategy for a lack of better way to describe it, this long because it's been several years in where the valuation that's being used for that roll-up strategy to use to justify the deals and the roll-up strategy hasn't been validated by either an IPO or to a strategic buyer, right? That we haven't seen in any industry, a roll-up strategy going this long, where there's a multiple differential as big as it is, and that valuation hasn't been validated by either an IPO or a sale to a strategic buyer. So what have we seen instead? We've seen them selling to each other in private equity, right, or sometimes selling to themselves in a continuation vehicle. So the question is where does that end? And where does that strategy end? Is it -- will the valuations be validated by the public markets? Well, we sure hope so. Because that would -- that should be good for Raymond James, if that's the case. If the valuations if all of you in the room are 50% off on your PE ratios, that would be great for all of us and for Raymond James as well. But it will be interesting to see how that happens. In the meantime, it is creating disruption in our industry, and there are big deals going around. And so it puts more pressure on us on all the strategic incumbents in the industry, to really prove out that value proposition. And on the fringes, it does provide also pressure to make sure we're being competitive on upfront deals and ongoing payouts and retention packages and all the other things that we have to do to make sure we're providing a financially attractive proposition in addition to a value proposition that's unique and special to the adviser. As far as M&A disruption goes, we are absolutely seeing -- whenever there's M&A disruption -- well, not in all cases because there's a lot of M&A disruption over the last 5 years where the profile of the adviser of the average production was below our floors for recruiting. So that didn't create opportunities for us. But when there's M&A disruption for advisers that are similar profiles to Raymond James, that always creates opportunity for us in the past, that is very typically create opportunities for us. I wouldn't say necessarily always. But we are absolutely seeing clearly on the independent side of the business. Our pipelines are very strong for recruiting. We don't know how much of that will be realized over time. But in terms of the activity levels that we're seeing, the number of meetings I'm personally being invited to attend and participate in, it's higher than it's been for several years.

Dan Fannon, Jefferies. You talked about market share gains in all of your businesses and you mentioned a few examples. But could you just highlight as you think about 2030 or whatever time period you want to look, what are the 2 or 3 biggest market share opportunities this firm looking to address?

Well, I would say our biggest business is our wealth business. So there's a significant opportunity in the West and the Northeast but even in our backyard. I looked down at Sarasota, Florida, where we have a pretty good presence but just 3 floors above us as a competitor with 3 or 4x the number of advisers. And so we have a significant opportunity to gain market share in the wealth business. But that's true in capital markets and M&A. Jim Bunn will get into that in a lot more detail in terms -- not just in the U.S. but globally, our M&A franchise opportunity to gain market share even in sales and trading, where our market share is relatively small. And then asset management, we have a $100 billion asset manager. That's -- there's a lot of opportunity to continue growing that over time as well. We have a lot of opportunities across all of our businesses to continue gaining share.

You mentioned $2.5 billion of excess capital of your conservative targets and that you have plans to address that. Can you elaborate on those plans, especially in the context sort of competition that you mentioned around on the M&A side. And then what's the sort of time frame at which you think that $2.5 billion could meaningfully come down?

Yes. Well, M&A, we have a very focused M&A effort across all of those businesses that I just described. And so we want to use that capital to continue growing the top line. That's the focus. In the meantime, we can at least help it from not continuing to grow further through stepped-up repurchases. So we -- Butch will talk about the amount of repurchases that we're targeting, which we shared in the last earnings call, it was about $400 million to $500 million a quarter which prevent the ratio from growing too much more from its current levels. But again, the recruiting opportunity that we're seeing, which is extremely robust. Now again, we don't know how much of that will get converted that uses a lot of cash, not a lot of regulatory capital, but a lot of cash that we hope to deploy to fuel growth.

Just a follow-up on the New York and California opportunity, thinking market share there. You rewind maybe 5 or 10 years ago, I think market share was relatively low in those markets as well. So I guess, what's going to change on a go-forward basis that gives you confidence you'll be able to take up market share in those markets? Do you think you need to adjust [ RIA ] rates in those markets or acquire something in those markets in order to be successful and gain market share?

And I'll defer a little bit to Tash on that, who's presenting next. But I would just say, high level, 15 years ago when we were a $3 billion market cap, our ability to be relevant into be known in those other markets beyond our home markets was more difficult than it is when you're near a $30 billion market cap and all the resources that we have at our current level. So I think size and resources and capabilities, when you're investing $1 billion in technology, mostly going into the wealth business, that gives you the ability to be more competitive beyond your core home markets in the Northeast and out west. We're also looking at, from a marketing perspective, what can we do to expand the awareness of our brand in those markets as well. So we're looking closely at marketing investment and making sure we're tailoring our marketing investment to that opportunity. But most importantly, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, it's leadership. So Tash can get into this in much more detail, but making sure we have the right leadership out West. Both on the employee side and independent contractor side of the business and the right leadership in the Northeast because the single biggest driver of growth we've seen in our history across any of our geographies is whether you have the right leaders and the right bodies in the right seats to drive that growth and to tell the Raymond James story.

Just on platform and over the next 10 years, I think you talked about and talked about measuring success. Just kind of talk through where some of your priorities are. If you look internally, maybe it's tech and AI, but if you flesh out where are the priorities -- resource allocation position that this platform over maybe some incremental effort inside RCS or maybe some other areas of the business. But just kind of can you talk through the priorities internally as you think about resource allocation for setting up the platform?

That's a great question. I think it's front and center, how can we continue to drive sustainable top line growth across all of our businesses. Sustainable, which means profitable growth, growth with robust service levels, growth where we don't dilute the culture of the firm, where people still feel that Raymond James is a special place that they're proud to be affiliated with. And so all of the initiatives that we have, whether it's adviser time business process improvement, which they'll talk about the technology investment, the product investment, the leadership that we're putting in different markets, it's all kind of revolves around our goal to continue generating sustainable growth. I mean that 149 consecutive quarters of profitability, that doesn't come by accident. That comes through a continued focus on how can we drive sustainable growth, long-term growth, not short-term growth. We want flexibility and capacity over the long term to continue driving sustainable growth. Good deal. With that, I'll hand it back over to Kristie for the next section. Thanks again for attending the conference today.

Thank you, Paul. Right. Next up, we have Tash Elwyn, who is currently our President of the Private Client Group, the role he assumed in October of last year. Prior to that, you would know Tash as our leader of our employee affiliation, Raymond James and Associates, a role he held for some time, helping to support advisers throughout that affiliation. So please welcome, Tash Elwyn.

Thank you, Kristie. It's great to be here with all of you this afternoon, both those that are here in person as well as everyone that's online today as well. And it's my privilege this afternoon to walk you through an overview of our Private Client Group, both the state of the business today and then even more importantly, where we believe we're headed together in the years to come. As you look at our Private Client Group at a high level, some of the key metrics that we think are important to start with are we have 8,731 advisers that are affiliated with us across all of the different channels of affiliation. And those advisers are collectively managing on behalf of their clients, $1.48 trillion in assets. Those assets, when you drill down and you look more specifically at fee-based assets, we've seen great success with a 16% CAGR over the past 5 years and the growth of our fee-based assets and fee-based assets now represent approximately 60% of the total assets in the Private Client Group. And then also very notably, we've seen $52 billion in net new assets in PCG over the trailing 12 months as well. All of this growth that we've seen over the many years at Raymond James has been fueled by that unwavering focus and commitment we have on clients and on financial advisers as our clients. So that's really what drives this long-term asset growth success that we've had and we see that as evidenced by the 14% CAGR in total assets under administration over the past 5 years. And then again, we're specifically looking at fee-based assets under administration. We've seen a 16% CAGR over the past 5 years. And as you look at the consistency of this growth, it's enabled us to outperform our peer group over every single one of the client groups that we've presented to you here when we look at total assets under administration within PCG. So whether it's the 1, the 3, 5 or 10-year period, you've seen Raymond James again outperform our peer group. And again, that comes from that consistent focus that we have on clients, on advisers as clients and on long-term growth at Raymond James. We see this evidenced as well by the 12% CAGR that we've seen in revenue over the past 5 years and then not only a 12% revenue CAGR but a 25% CAGR over the past 5 years on our pretax income as well. That takes us to today and looking forward. And so as we look ahead to the next decade and beyond in the Private Client Group, we're excited to share with you our Private Client Group vision, which is to inspire and empower the world's best financial professionals. Short on words, perhaps, but we think each one of these words has great imports. And I would start with to inspire and to empower again, celebrating the independence and the economy that the financial advisers that are affiliated with Raymond James enjoy. It's core to our culture to always aspire, to inspire and empower advisers and branch professionals, to determine how best to weave together the resources and the capabilities of the firm in a way that's going to create even better client experience, even better client outcomes. And as a consequence of that, reward our financial advisers and reward us as their partner with even more significant business growth and success. World's best. A lot of debate around that term, certainly a very aspirational term, but as aspirational as it is with the vision statement to be the world's best. We could not have been more proud just a couple of months ago to see our financial advisers recognized by J.D. Power as the #1 firm in the industry in advised investor satisfaction and not only #1 in advised investor satisfaction, but we were also named as the most trusted, and that's a great testament to the important work that our financial advisers are doing as part of this noble profession. And it's also a great testament to the strength of the partnership. The value-add that comes from this proverbial village, if you will, at our home office. And then lastly, as part of our PCG vision, financial professionals. And while you've heard us describe several times already this afternoon that we've even embraced the financial adviser to be our client, in addition, obviously, to the importance of their clients. We intentionally broadened this to say, financial professionals because our vision is to inspire and empower everyone that's part of this commitment to serving clients and growing the business. So it speaks not only to the importance of the financial advisers as part of our private client group, but also all of the branch professionals that support them. And then the entirety of our home office here in St. Pete, in Memphis, Southfield, New York and across the country because, again, it truly does take this proverbial village. We heard Paul Shoukry a moment ago reference the importance of Raymond James offering each and every affiliation that the industry is yet to never create. And just as it's important that financial advisers help clients be diversified and be asset allocated and be all weather, if you will, by the broad diversification we have of all of the affiliations that you see represented on this slide, Raymond James can meet advisers wherever they are in terms of their career needs and interests such that whether it's affiliating with us in the traditional employee model, the independent contractor, the RIA model or any of the others that are represented here, we're able to importantly meet advisers wherever they may be in the industry. I think it's also important to note that as you continue to see this trend continue in terms of the move to independence that we remind you that independence is not channel specific. And rather independence is really much more of a cultural view in terms of how do you support and empower financial professionals to be their very best. And so Raymond James is a tremendous beneficiary of the move to independence across all of these channels, even though some may zig and zag a little bit differently in different market conditions. Each and every one of these has been a consistent beneficiary, and we believe we'll continue to have great opportunities to continue to grow in the years ahead. Paul made reference to our competitive advantage in terms of the best of both world's positioning. And I want to elaborate on that just a moment this afternoon as well because as we think about how barbelled the industry has become over the years, barbelled in terms of just through consolidation and in some cases, collapse. You have at one end of the barbell, you have very large competitors, large banks, wirehouses, et cetera, that have varying degrees of capabilities but they, in many cases, have grown to such an extent or change to such an extent that culturally, they may scarcely resemble the types of firms that so many financial advisers may have grown up with. And then at the other end of the barbell, you'll find start-ups and boutiques and regionals. And these are firms that to varying degrees may have culture, but they just don't have the scale to have the full breadth and depth of the capabilities, the technology, the intellectual capital, the investment solution, what advisers need coming out of the other end of the barbell to really make a difference in our clients' lives and be rewarded with business growth. And so as we've described with the scale of Raymond James, advisers that we have an opportunity to recruit to compete for no longer have to choose between with this barbell capabilities or culture because Raymond James genuinely represents that best of both worlds, where we're simultaneously big enough, but small enough, we have the solutions, and we have the accessibility and the responsiveness. And we still have that family feel where, as Paul described, as part of his travels, he hears and we hear it time and time again that the best decision I ever made was to join Raymond James. And the only regret that I have is that I didn't do it sooner. As we drill down then on the vision statement into the strategic initiatives that are going to support and fuel this continued growth and success into the years ahead. It's going to be driven by 3 core strategies, as you see outlined here. It's the importance of adviser retention. Retention is always most important foundation from which you can grow. It's the emphasis on recruiting and then the continued focus and even expansion, if you will, of our success from an adviser and a branch professional productivity standpoint. So if we double-click first on retention. Paul did a terrific job just a moment ago highlighting the strength and the stability of Raymond James Financial as a partner to our financial advisers and to their clients. And we can't ever overlook or take for granted the importance of that to an adviser's decision to continue to be affiliated with Raymond James, given the many choices that they may have across the industry. And then beyond that, it's the commitment, as we just described, again, with the best of both worlds of having all of the capabilities that they've come to expect and need coming out of some of the biggest firms that we may compete with but then enjoying and accessing those solutions within a culture that is truly client-centric adviser centric. And then pairing all of that with very importantly, profession leading levels of adviser satisfaction where as strong of a partner as Raymond James already is today in no ways are we resting on our laurels or taking that for granted, but rather we continue, as Paul described, with the focus on adviser time, we continue to make it even easier for financial advisers and branch professionals to work with Raymond James and even easier to make a difference in our clients' lives, which is most important. And then as a consequence of all of that for advisers to be rewarded with enhanced adviser productivity. That takes us to recruiting. And already a moment ago, a number of great questions on that topic, and I'll be happy -- who wants to dig deeper into that when we get to Q&A to do so. But as you look at the success that we've had consistently so year in and year out at Raymond James. And then you look at how we're going to amplify this in the years ahead. It begins first with a more collaborative and a more centralized recruiting process across all of the affiliation channels at Raymond James, where the aspiration is to create an even better experience than we already do for candidates that are considering affiliating with Raymond James. So within the past year, we centralized many of our recruiting functions under the leadership of Jodi Perry. For many years before that, it served as President of Independent Contractor division, and she brought her passion and her leadership for recruiting to our adviser choice consulting team and has helped us create and even more collaborative process to create better experiences than we already do for the candidates and then to create even better results from a recruiting standpoint through that enhanced collaboration across all of the applications. For reference from Paul a moment ago, both during his remarks and in his response to the questions of the importance of the focus on the West Coast and the Northeast. And as we look at where we are today in total assets under administration, and we look out to 2030, 2035 and even beyond, we believe that well over half of our growth opportunities from an asset standpoint, better resolve share of wealth standpoint, are going to come from the West Coast and the Northeast. As we both help advisers that are already affiliated with us, even more deeply serve their clients and gain share of wallet. But then as part of that as well, we continue to see more success than we've already seen in those geographies as well. And asking a moment ago about what might be different as we look ahead? I won't say different, but what I'll say that we're going to continue to reaffirm is the importance of having the best athletes that we possibly can in the field from a talent standpoint. And so that's investing in, as Paul described, really strong leaders in all of our geographies and in particular, in -- much potential outside of the years to come. And then pairing that as I just described a moment ago, with that more collaborative process. And then lastly, from a recruiting statement, certainly do not overlook in any way the importance of our next-gen strategy as well. And so we've all seen different consulting industry reports suggesting that there is potentially going to be a really significant shortfall in the number of advisers in the next decade to come. And that shortfall of projected advisers likely coincide with then having fewer advisers having to serve more clients than they've ever served before. And not only fewer advisers in the industry serving more clients than ever before, but fewer advisers in the industry serving more clients with more complexity than ever before. And there's a number of ways from a strategic standpoint, Raymond James -- bless you that Raymond James will solve for that. Technology will be a big enabler in terms of giving branch professionals and financial advisers more capacity to handle both the higher quantity of advisers and clients as well more complexity with their clients. But then in addition to that are the investments that we continue to make in attracting next-gen advisers. And next-gen is a reference both to those advisers that we source and attract and develop through our adviser mastery program. But then in addition to that, having a recruiting focus on attracting top-performing next-gen talent is a complement to our traditional adviser recruiting as well. Obviously, when we look at our recruiting results and we look at the marriage of that with retention, we can see the benefits that, that has from not only a total asset under administration growth standpoint, but then also the importance of that in terms of continuing to fuel over long periods of time, consistent net new asset growth as well for the Private Client Group. We've seen, as a consequence of all that I've described, we've seen really strong asset growth across all of our affiliation models. And again, as you think about the diversification our asset allocation, if you will, from an affiliation option standpoint. You can see very strong and competitive growth from each and every one of the PCG affiliations. And that's something we continue to have confidence in as we look ahead as well. And then lastly, across the 3 primary strategic initiatives that bring us to the focus on adviser productivity. And again, that comes back to how do we position Raymond James in the years ahead, to be an even better partner than we already are to the advisers that we have the privilege of serving. Much of that will be technology enabled and technology-driven, hence, the nearly $1 billion investment that Raymond James is making this year in technology, much of which as Paul just described a few moments ago, is an adviser-facing technology to help them be even more efficient productive in terms of how they serve clients, how they manage their business. The advancements that we're making is described by adviser time and making it even easier and more efficient to partner with Raymond James as an adviser. The focus that we have on private wealth and by no means is this an emergent focus. Raymond James has long been a very strong and capable player in the private wealth space. But within the last 2 years, we've invested even more significantly in that space, both in terms of the education, the training, the accreditation as well as continuing to invest in the capabilities to help those advisers that are affiliated with Raymond James that have a high net worth and an ultra-high net worth focus, be positioned to be even more successful in that regard. And not only is it enhancements in training and education, but also in the product solutions space as well. And so some examples there would be, while, again, we've long had strength in terms of alternative investments and private market activities, significant investment by Raymond James in those regards as well to ensure we have best-in-class solutions that allow advisers to meet the needs on a continued basis of the most sophisticated clients. And then last but not least, borrowing a page, if you will, from our own playbook with the success that we've enjoyed in the last 2 years with the emphasis I just described on wealth. We're now extending that to a focus on business owners and workplace solutions as well. And just as I described with private wealth, this too is not new to Raymond James as a competency but it will be reaffirmed by Raymond James as one of the most significant strategic drivers as we look ahead. We've already seen great success over the past 5 years in terms of the synergies that have been created between Raymond James Investment Banking and the Raymond James Private Client Group, where our colleagues and teammates and investment banking have helped invest in the education of our advisers to be even more fluent in meeting the needs of business owners in terms of helping them unlock and ultimately monetize the equity they're building in their businesses. And so again, taking a page from that playbook, we're extending that into an even broader focus on business owners, corporate retirement plan and overall workplace well to workplace solutions. On that topic of synergies, I just described with a great example of that connectivity between our investment bank and our Private Client Group and Paul Shoukry made reference to this slide as well. Our Private Client Group is a tremendous beneficiary of the breadth and depth that exists in Raymond James. And so the uniqueness of our advisers' ability to partner with Raymond James Bank and to leverage those tools and capabilities, the benefit of their clients. The way we can connect and access best-in-class solutions from our asset management business to connect with not only our equity capital markets business, but also our fixed income capital markets business, which Jim talked more about in a moment. All of that allows advisers in a very client-centric way, which is always most important at Raymond James to more deeply meet the needs of their clients, create better experiences and outcomes. And again, as a consequence of that rewarded with business growth. So I'll conclude my formal remarks again with this slide, which reaffirms the vision, as I described a moment ago, which is to inspire and to empower the world's best financial advisers. And then we see all of that is fueled by the culture, the best of both worlds, the stability of the firm, our commitment to the adviser's book ownership and having internal choice and external choice and really positioning ourselves at all times to sit on the same side of the table as a partner to the financial advisers that we have the privilege of serve. I'll pause there, and we'd love to open it up for Q&A.

Michael?

Appreciate the presentation. A question on the $1 billion investment in technology. I was just hoping you could unpack the key components of that. How much of that is going into, say, compensation of technology-related employees and such versus hardware versus software employees. And then can you speak to some of the major initiatives that this investment is helping drive what you expect from that? And then how this $1 billion compares versus, say, last year, the prior fiscal year?

Yes. Terrific questions. As conversant and fluent as I am on much of that, I'm going to respectfully defer a good bit of that to Andy and to Vin who are going to present just a bit later on the topic of these technology investments. But to get a little bit more granular as we look at some of the immediate benefits that come from that would be the, I think, very early and promising wins we're seeing with the investments that the firm is making both internally and externally and our AI capabilities. So as an example of that, tying together a number of these different topics just this morning I had the opportunity to attend one of our private wealth adviser accreditation classes, which is in session on our campus today. And not only did I attend that this morning, but right around the corner, I attended our next-gen Technology Advisory Council breakfast. And I heard with no prompting for me from both of those constituencies, how much productivity lift they're getting from the investments that the firm is making in technology and one adviser that quoted this morning that he believes that in terms of client preparation for portfolio review meetings that leveraging our AI capabilities now is giving him back about 90 minutes per client per review. And when you think about the productive capacity that comes from that and you think about the importance with all of these technology investments that we're making of investing in a way that we automate what the machine does best, whether the machine is NLP or ML or AI, but investing in the machine to do what it does best, which is to analyze data and streamline processes. And then in turn, that liberates the professionals that are affiliated with Raymond James, whether they're branch professionals or financial advisers to do what they do best, which is to engage human-to-human and deepen relationships, add more value and importantly, have more capacity to not only more deeply serve those clients, but also to attract new clients. But again, I'll defer to Andy and Vin to do a deeper dive on that.

Devin Ryan, Citizens JMP. Obviously, a lot of big themes in the space right now, you have the generational wealth transfer, little advisory head count growth over the last 20 years, aging advisers, technology like AI as you just talked about. I know these themes that they move slowly. It seems like over time, when you zoom out and back 25 years or so, the advisers did the job feels very different today than they did a decade ago. So when you look forward over the next 10 years, can you hit on what you think the characteristics of the firms that really separate themselves are going to be like the key characteristics of who the winners are. Do these themes drive more consolidation? You're seeing consolidation now, but it seems like the gap is growing and then the point on not having -- there isn't like a bench of younger advisers. An aging adviser, maybe we're getting to a cliff. Do we need to solve for that? Or does technology really just solve for that. So to your point, adviser, just much more productive.

Yes. There's -- I think a lot in there. A lot to unpack there, but let me do my best to do so. As we look ahead, I think it's also important to look backwards. And what I mean by that is, I think back to handful of years ago, a handful, say, 5 to 7 years ago, whereas we were being as attentive as need to be obviously to adviser demographics and retirement trends, et cetera, we began forecasting the probability of what adviser retirements might look like over the next 10 to 20 years, we recognized what the consultants are now speaking of only today and getting ahead of that, we began making investments in further developing our commitment to training and attracting next-generation advisers. And when some of our competitors have a much more short-term focus and today focus and perhaps eating tomorrow seed corn for today and so forth. We've consistently been making investments in attracting that next generation of advisers. And so as we look at the average age and an adviser that's affiliated with Raymond James today, it is younger, albeit slightly younger, but younger than it was 5 or 10 years ago. And so not only have we had great success in retaining advisers, not only have we had great success over the years in attracting advisers, but we've also seen a very positive demographic shift in terms of the age of the average adviser that's affiliated with us, but still much, much more work to do in that regard. And so as you look forward, I think it's also important to continue to be seen as a firm that is focused on human advice and not only focused on human advice but focused on the independence of that human advice. And I think there's a temptation like so many in the profession to try to take out cost, if you will, through standardization and at times even to think of this as a financial services factory. There are absolutely, as I've described, there are efficiencies to be gained from technology. Raymond James is appropriately making those investments. You can't overlook how bespoke and individualized device needs to be for clients. And so by being seen as a firm that continues to value the independence and the autonomy of advisers to act then independently on behalf of their clients. We said another way, I believe that Raymond James stays true to our values and our culture who we are. I think the more unique we're going to look in the industry over the next 5 to 10 years as others try to standardize and commoditize advice to take out cost. And I believe that's the only further cement and reaffirm our unique positioning in the firm as a terrific partner for advisers.

There continues to be an asset mix shift into the RIA segment within your PCG business. I think it's about 14% of the AUM or the AUA that you have now. When we think about what's driving that -- I'm assuming it's mostly coming from the independent contractor side that assets are migrating there. Can you just kind of talk a little bit about that broader trends just because how quickly that segment is growing? And when we think about the pretax profitability for asset, do we have to think of material differences in that as we go from the employee to the independent to the RIA.

Yes, good questions there. So as we look at the success of RCS, our RIA company business at Raymond James, roughly speaking, in recent years, the asset growth there has been fueled roughly 50-50 between internal transition and external recruitment and attracting of assets and additional clients and custody firms. And so a bit internal and a bit external and fairly equally weighted. And then to your point, Kyle, where we -- the advisers choosing a different affiliation internally. And if that affiliation is, in this case, the RIA affiliation. You are correct that generally speaking, that's an adviser that's in the independent contractor affiliation choosing for various reasons. The RIA model is potentially a better fit for their practice and or, of course, for their clients as well. Less common to see an adviser whether internally or externally to make the leap fully from being a W-2 affiliation with us or anyone else to an RIA, just given some of the complexities in terms of business structure and your compliance functions and so forth. So that's generally been what the trends have been in recent years.

I think there was a little bit of a comment in there about in general, getting more expensive to recruit. Maybe you can help us kind of contextualize what that is today, how it compares to a couple of years ago. How much cash do you budget each year for that recruiting?

So I've been affiliated now with Raymond James for coming up on 32 years this October. And in one shape, form or fashion, I've been involved in recruiting for 24 of those 32 years. And so as we talk about the expense of recruiting, I don't ever remember a time period where it was inexpensive, and so I think it's important to have that context. And while certainly, with each passing year, it does seem to become even more competitive and more expensive to recruit. And while Raymond James, obviously, is attractive as the culture and the value proposition is, we do have to be competitive. But to a large extent, why Raymond James is so competitive from a recruiting standpoint despite the escalation of cost has been our ability to consistently monetize the culture and recognize that as advisers are contemplating where best to partner, every firm to a large extent, tells the same story. They all say incredibly client-centric. They all say we love advisers. And so it's incumbent upon us as we share the Raymond James story to help put actions behind words and really demonstrate what the proof points are apply advisers are not only going to be happier at Raymond James, but also going to be better able to serve their clients and grow. And so regardless of what the spreads may be and there will always be spreads, I believe, between our economics and that of others. There are a tremendous number of advisers in this industry that what they most want is to be compensated fairly. They wanted to be treated with dignity and respect and they want to affiliate with a partner that's going to help them put their clients first to be rewarded with business growth. And that's been an all-weather strategy for Raymond James for many decades, and I expect it's going to continue to serve us well in the decades to come.

Harry Venezia with Healthcare Capital Advisors. I want to ask a specific question along growth. Do you see the Alex Brown brand and culture as a platform for Raymond James to grow in the ultra-high net worth sector or those other geographies in the Northeast or California or better just left independent and left as a regional presence?

So great question. Alex Brown is very proudly a part of Raymond James and has been a terrific catalyst over the last 7 to 8 years. For so much of what I've described in terms of that commitment to the private wealth market. And while the advisers that joined Alex. Brown brought with them tremendous expertise, what they also brought was a lot of strong interest in helping the entirety of Raymond James to become even better at what we do. And it's been a rising tide, if you will, that has lifted all boats. And so as we look at the different affiliations as we've described them. Alex. Brown brand, it continues to be a very important part of the brand. The advisers are very near and dear to us, and they are joining the Raymond James family has been, as I said, a great catalyst for us to continue to make a number of the investments that I described. Thank you, Kristie. Thank you, everyone.

All right. We'll keep -- try to keep on schedule here. So next up is Steve Raney. Steve oversees the firm's bank segment. He also serves as the Executive Chairman of Raymond James Bank and is on the Board of TriState Capital Bank. Steve joined the firm as CEO of Raymond James Bank in 2006 and please join me in welcoming Steve.

Thank you, Kristie. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me introduce Amanda Stevens who's the new CEO, Raymond James Bank. Amanda, say hello to everybody. I know you know some folks. But Amanda, we were fortunate enough to get her about 7 or 8 years ago to join as our Chief Operating Officer and took over as the CEO this fiscal year, is doing a great job of leading our RJ Bank team here in St. Petersburg. So let me hit a couple of the financial highlights. The bank segment now between Raymond James Bank and TriState Capital Bank is around $63 billion of total assets of our combined $83 billion of holding company assets. The $63 billion of those assets sit in the banking segment. And you may have noticed over the last few quarters, the total bank assets have been relatively flat. We've been growing loans, and we've been doing that by virtue of converting some of our lower-yielding securities as we're getting paid out on those securities and putting them into more profitable, higher yielding loans. And that dynamic will probably end kind of toward the end of this year, and you'll start to see some asset growth as we continue to grow the enterprise inside the banking segment. So I know everybody is well aware that we enjoy this very unique funding from our private client group clients that provide a big chunk of the funding for both RJ Bank in particular, but also at TriState, and that flexible and diversified deposit base has been very powerful part of our economics as a banking enterprise. I know you saw the capital ratios from Paul Shoukry earlier at the holding company and both banks enjoy very strong capital positions will access the regulatory minimums. RJ Bank has actually been the last several years have been actually generating more earnings than we need to grow our balance sheet. So we've been in dividend mode. And then more recently, TriState has actually been generating enough earnings, so it doesn't need additional capital. It's a dividend mode, but it's got strong earnings that's supporting its growth. So I know and we'll talk a lot about the way we work with the other business units, but a lot of RJ Bank, in particular, a lot of our business is tied directly to the financial advisers. Private Client Group as well as our institutional clients that are covered in Jim Bunn's Capital Markets organization. So out of the $63 billion in total assets almost $49 billion in total loans in various categories that we'll get into. And we're continuing on this march to really focus on our private client banking assets, our securities-based lines of credit that exist at both Raymond James Bank as well as TriState Capital Bank and an important element for both institutions is really sticking to our knitting and a very conservative credit culture. So one of the things that we pride ourselves on is the capital management, the risk management that is, I think, very consistent with the overall approach to how Raymond James runs our business, and we've been able to manage through that for a long time at both institutions. So we've been a vital part of the company in terms of revenue growth as well as earnings growth. It looks a little odd here where you see fiscal '23, in fiscal '24 compared to '23. That was all interest rate related when you got the rate reduction that impacted our net revenues. And now we're in the process of stabilizing and growing revenues and our profitability trends are very positive at both banks as well. So enjoyed strong loan growth. You see some of these compounded annual growth rates. Part of that is impacted by the TriState combination. We just celebrated our 3-year anniversary in early this week so June 1, 2022. We combined with TriState a little over 3 years now. They've been part of the Raymond James family. At the time they contributed about $12 billion of total loans or about $15 billion in assets at that time really grown to $21 billion in total assets. And I think we've done a pretty effective job in this interest rate environment of actually stabilizing and actually now we're starting to see maybe a slight increase in our net interest margin. So we've been relatively stable at a little over 260 approaching 2.7% on a combined basis between the 2 banks on our net interest margin. So as I shared earlier, this continued focus on growing our private client loans, including mortgages and our SBLs, you see here how that's become a bigger part of the enterprise. While we're continuing to grow our commercial and corporate lending, commercial real estate business. It's just growing at a lower rate as we continue to focus on these lower risk as well as, in some ways, a lot more accretive and partnered with our client group financial advisers. We have a very diverse asset mix in our loan portfolio. We talked about the SBLs and our residential mortgages. Our commercial and industrial business across the 2 banks are highly diverse across a broad spectrum of industries. We have some fun finance business, subscription line business, traditional C&I across a wide variety of industries, health care, technology, consumer, a small portfolio of energy loans. We have a very diverse commercial real estate portfolio, a very low level of office exposure. For example, I know that's gotten maybe a little bit less attention in the last year or so but a very low level, very diverse portfolio across a wide spectrum of property types as well as wide geographies that we benefit from having a really national business. And we have this tax exempt business where we make loans to municipalities and nonprofits that are almost 100% referred to us from Raymond James public finance, and we cover that market with providing some relatively short-term loans on a tax-exempt basis to them. So the funding mix is also kind of notable. If you look back, we're -- in 2019, we were 97% funded with sleep balances as a result of dynamics with rapidly changing deposits as well as the addition of the TriState enterprise 3 years ago. We have a much more diverse fund [indiscernible] we launched this enhanced savings account 3 years ago that has turned out to be a great way to attract new deposits that's roughly $13.5 billion, all of which is clients of Raymond James that are opening an account through their financial adviser and their sales assistant, opening a bank account, that account yields around 4% right now. And then one of the benefits of this TriState combination has been they had a more traditional deposit gathering apparatus that we knew one day that we were going to need to tap into that. It's actually expedited itself just given some of the changes in the deposit dynamics in the banking community. So to the extent that they've got what we refer to as national sales as well as the traditional commercial banking, treasury management offering that provides diverse funding, we're trying to leverage that in a bigger way as well going forward. We'll talk a little bit about that. So -- I've hit on some of this already, but the Raymond James Bank deposit program has been in existence now for -- we started in July of 2006 so quite a while now, not almost in 19 years since we flipped the switch and started that program, and it's provided us great funding. A big chunk of it is at RJ Bank, but a little over $3 billion of our sweep money is actually funding part of the TriState portfolio as well. And then we have these other as I just referenced, these other deposit capabilities, primarily at TriState, now that we're working on expanding that we'll talk about. Some real quick credit statistics, we're once again, very prideful of how we do the risk management around the loan portfolio and a long track record here of having substantial reserves or allowance to loans. You see the trend has actually come down a little bit in the bottom right, but that's also reflective of this asset mix where we have a lot lower reserve levels on our securities-based loans and credit as well as our residential portfolio. So to the extent that those assets become a bigger percentage. It just drives down your total allowance, your allowance to total loan percentage. So I still feel like we're on a relative basis, very well reserved against any future loan losses. Some of the things that you've already heard from Paul and Tash and you'll hear from some of the other leaders today, the bank adopts that same service first culture that you hear about inside of Raymond James in terms of how we are very uniquely positioned to support our financial advisers as well as our end clients with really kind of world-class service, and we really pride ourselves on that. And to the extent that we don't -- we find something that did go perfect, we do our best to take that into account and make improvements in terms of how our service delivers. We have tremendous respect for how these financial advisers conduct their business while it would be awesome for my vantage point of running this business, if we were to do more direct marketing, that's just not part of the culture of Raymond James. So we work through these financial advisers, build their confidence that we will do a great job with their client and then ultimately, that leads to greater business for us. And then we'll talk a little bit about the growing product and solution set that we continue to evolve over time. So I did want to mention there's 3 initiatives that are kind of part of our strategic plan over the next few years and expanding our securities-based lending business. We'll talk a little bit about that. The treasury management offering, the TriState has 15-plus years now of expertise. We're leveraging some of that and I'll explain how we're trying to expand that inside of the Raymond James ecosystem. And then what are we going to do to do our institutional lending inside of the Raymond James enterprise to support our capital markets clients. So I know you've already seen this slide, a lot of our reliance and a lot of our partnership is with these other business units, the Capital Markets team and Private Client Group, in particular, where we -- there's business going on both directions, deposits, loans, advisory work. I know that we launched within the last year, this private credit initiative to be more supportive of the financial sponsor community, that's a very important client base of our capital market professionals and we did that in a way with another financial partner from a risk management standpoint, where we have the last loss piece. They have the first loss piece, but it's a way for us to be more relevant to sponsors on M&A transactions. So that effort is really just in its just kind of getting kicked off, we've only closed a few loans that are in that vein. So some of the things that we're doing to expand our securities-based lending business, and this applies at both banks is we're adding to our banking consultant coverage model, if you will, of how we cover the financial advisers, the over 8,000 financial advisers at Raymond James. And I would say one of the strong tailwinds that the TriState team has is -- you've already heard about the growing RIA sector. They support and do business with a lot of third-party and custodial firms that are attracting new advisers to those platforms and they need a loan solution. And so there are now over 16,000 financial advisers with these custodial firms that TriState does business with that are connected to what we call the digital lending platform. This is the proprietary TriState technology platform and how an adviser would get a loan application to them for their clients. So there's over 16,000 of them now. Every year, it's been growing. And the underlying custodial firms are actually growing their adviser base, which is great for our TriState team. So both of those -- both bank enterprises are adding to our sales force to be able to being able to penetrate more advisers and be more responsive to being able to meet their needs of their clients. So that's one investment we're making. And we continue to make automation and enhancements to reporting both from an adviser as well as the end clients they can see. For example, transactional information on their SBLs they're doing it alone and [indiscernible] pay down, we want them to see transactional information that's an example of something that's going to be forthcoming very soon. And then also, just in general, are there other potential collateral types that we could take in addition to what we're already lending against from an SBL standpoint. So the product evolution of certain alternatives for our high net worth clients that continues to evolve from kind of a straightforward vanilla collateral type, are there certain clients that we would be comfortable with expanding into, in some cases, a little bit more esoteric collateral. We're evaluating that from a risk management standpoint. So I mentioned the treasury management offering that TriState has. So one of the things that we are -- we've not done historically, but we're in the middle of a very serious evaluation right now is how could we tap into the very large number of business owners that had a relationship with Raymond James already. So there's almost 50,000 business accounts that are on the Raymond James platform already. We're not providing them with their commercial deposits and treasury management offering. So we're evaluating what we would need from a product set from an operational standpoint, what do we need to do to be able to offer that product more broadly to our Raymond James client base. So as that evolves, we look forward to discussing that with you in greater detail as that work continues to evolve, but we think that's a very nice opportunity inside of the Raymond James client base. And as I mentioned, we're looking at ways to expand our corporate lending that's supportive of our institutional clients. So there's a variety of different ways, things we could do more strategically with the private equity community, with the financial sponsor community. You'll hear from Jim later, we've expanded our public finance practice which is a great business. We want to be even more responsive to the needs of the public finance and municipal clients and just continued working with the ever-growing investment banking practice and how can we be even more relevant to those types of clients going forward.

With that, I'll open it up to any questions. We got a few minutes before the break. Yes, Michael.

Michael Cyprys, Morgan Stanley. You mentioned that asset growth should materialize for the bank towards the end of this fiscal year. If you could elaborate on the moving pieces that you see driving that? What sort of magnitude of balance sheet growth can we see, how do you expect the pace of that to evolve as we look out over the next couple of years?

Yes. I would say, Michael, I would say the balance sheet growth for the bank segment, the 2 banks combined will probably be in the high single-digit range in terms of assets. So that's kind of a good target for us. So it will be -- it could be lumpy at times. Our corporate lending business in particular, we're very nimble. There are periods of time when spreads are wider and the opportunities are more robust. We're in an environment right now where spreads are pretty tight and the opportunities are just not that prevalent. So loans have been relatively flat in our corporate lending book in both businesses. But at the same time, both banks have enjoyed the last 4 months or so of kind of record SBL volume is an area that we like to focus. So I would say, Michael, in general, over the next couple of years, once we get to this point where a securities portfolio runoff, we'll get to a point where we want to keep it stable just for liquidity management purposes, I would say kind of high single-digit balance sheet growth would be kind of a good number for us to focus in on. Yes, Devin?

Devin Ryan, Citizens JMP. On the treasury management, it sounds pretty interesting. Any sense if you're like the primary relationship for a certain percentage of that 50,000? And then, what else do you need to do to kind of build out the capabilities there and then any sense on just timing because it seems interesting.

Yes, I would say for the most part, we are not the primary bank, if you will, from all those -- it's a very small number where we're the primary bank. A lot of these are business owners that have part of their business accounts with us and the adviser is managing some of those cash balances as well as maybe some investments that are actually technically owned by the business. So it's a very small number, but you like that number that we already have a relationship with a very large number already. And there's a big number of these 8,000-plus financial advisers that we don't have business accounts with, but they're doing business with the principals or the management teams of businesses around the country. We know it's a very competitive business. So we're not going to get all of it, but we think that given some of the strong relationships that there's going to be enough opportunity for us to make this investment. So in terms of the timing, it's a little -- we're pretty early on in the evaluation, we're going through what we would need from a technology. The good news is a lot of the technology through a lot of the normal bank providers that you would imagine like both banks use Fiserv as our core processor. There's a lot of the technology that is relatively easy to plug in to be able to provide. So we're still going through the evaluation. We want to make sure we understand exactly what we need to spend to get this thing up and running and we want to make sure that we fully evaluate it, is the opportunity significant enough for us to be able to launch this. We think the early indication is that it will be, but we want to go through that exercise. So that being said, it's probably still like into the end of '26 before we would even be able to launch it. There's an evaluation process and then also getting the technology set up and as well as the sales and support and everything you got to do to be able to provide that. So it's been very educational that although we don't have brick-and-mortar branches, and we don't have that. We don't have bankers on the ground. And the treasury management business, in particular, you can do that. A lot of the TriState accounts are all over the country because they've got some specialization in certain industries with certain types of businesses that are conducive to being able to do that. So I would say we're not going to do this in a way where we would be able to -- anything that's currency related. We will not be doing -- delivering currency or taking cash, deposits and things like that. So there are certain businesses that we won't be well suited for like small -- really small businesses either. So we do think that there's going to be enough of an opportunity that are inside the Raymond James system to us to be able to attract some new deposits and further diversify our funding. Yes, Dan?

Just in the opportunity within PCG, what is a reasonable expectation for the amount of dollar around percentage of lending that you guys think is appropriate for your current customer rates. Every financial institution wants to lend more, or they're high net worth first. But like what is -- for your guys' goal over the next couple of years, like what's a reasonable level of penetration in that?

Yes. Our penetration, Dan, has been on an upward trend for about 10 years in both SBL and mortgage. SBLs are easier to the adviser and the client to sign up. So we're over 70%, for example, of all of our financial advisers that they have at least one client that has an SBL with us. Mortgages, it's a little under 50%. So every year, both of those product types continues to increase. So there is room for improvement. And so there's still some advisers that we've not gotten to use the lending business with -- and that's totally fine. We continue to educate them so there's more opportunity. And also just the recruitment. Virtually every new adviser that's joined usually bringing loan opportunities with them. So we're an integral part of the transition process when they're bringing their clients over and we're needing to accommodate those loans. So -- and so I think a combination of a more penetration as well as just the higher adviser count will continue to support that business. And then to the extent that our product offering, I mentioned some of the collateral types, can that evolve over time. We do like commercial real estate to some very high net worth clients, we typically are doing larger loan sizes. Is there a way to do that in a more efficient way and do it at a greater scale. That's something that is under consideration. So there's a lot of opportunity inside of the Raymond James client base that we continue to enjoy. So well, thanks again, everybody. Appreciate it.

Okay. That actually brings us to our break. So we will go ahead and break for about 15 minutes so probably return a little bit around 3:20. Thank you very much. [Break]

Okay. We are back. Thank you all for continuing to stay on and join us. Next, we'll start the next portion of our session with Jim Bunn. Jim is the President of Capital Markets and Advisory for Raymond James. Prior to this role, he served as President of Global Equities and Investment Banking and was also Head of Investment Banking. He joined Raymond James through the 2009 acquisition of Lane Berry. Please help me welcome, Jim.

Thanks, Kristie, and I'm going to start by reorganization that's created this business. While you have seen in our public reporting for years, we've reported on Capital Markets. It's actually not the way we've historically been organized internally. We had all the global equities and investment banking and fixed income and affordable housing businesses to run separately in that part of one business unit. That's part of the reorganization and some of the succession within the company over the last year, actually brought all of those businesses together effectively, all of our institutional businesses together under one umbrella for the first time, and that's having some really positive benefits to us as a business. We're finding a lot of ways for each of these businesses to work together in new ways that historically you might think we're all part of the same company, couldn't that have happened before. Certainly, it could have, but now operating under common management with our leadership operating and one team is really helping us identify and bring those synergies between the businesses to life. And just to give you a few examples of what some of these might be, in investment banking, we cover financial institutions with a particular focus on community and regional banks. Within our fixed income brokerage business, our fixed income capital markets business, their largest client constituency is community and regional banks. But historically, there wasn't as much collaboration between organizations -- wasn't as much sharing relationships. We're really doing a terrific job now of producing bankers to our trading relationships vice versa to take advantage of -- distributing debt for our real estate investment banking clients through our fixed income sales force to their bank clients. Our affordable housing business, their biggest investor base in their deals are community and regional banks and the fixed income brokerage business is now introducing those opportunities to their clients. So we're finding a lot of different ways to now synergize these businesses, harmonize them and work together much more and that's really paying a lot of dividends for us and driving a lot of our growth strategies going forward. Just to give you some perspective on where we play in each of the businesses, what differentiates us, how we deplete what are some of the key metrics. I'll start with our advisory business. That's really that together with our equity debt capital markets is what we refer to as our investment banking business and how we organize. That's a very sort of middle market, upper middle market type of focus business, very focused on sell-side M&A. We do some buy-side work. We do some other types of transactions. But sell-side M&A is the bread and butter and the core strategic focus and in particular, for private companies and in particular, for private equity-owned private companies. We do some public company work that tends to be focused in some of our more public company order practices like financials, oil and gas, across technology, health care, consumer industrials, very private equity focused. That's been the biggest and fastest-growing part of our business, and that's been a big part of what's been driving improvement in a lot of the key metrics. So we've grown our [indiscernible]. I'll show you how that's progressed. There's been a real focus on moving that business upmarket to larger and larger transactions with larger and larger fees. So in this last year, our average enterprise value in our advisory business from a sell-side perspective is about $250 million. And our average fee was north of $3 million. We're very pleased with those. Those are more than double what those metrics were just 5 or 6 years ago. So we've really seen a lot of good progress in those metrics as we continue to push consistently upmarket into larger, larger transactions and the private equity relationship is a big part of what is propelled at. Equity and debt capital markets, somewhat self-explanatory, very focused on IPOs and follow-ons. We're also building a private placement focus within that business, institutional private placements. We just recently added a team to focus on that in a very deliberate way. Our average equity underwriting fee last year was $1.4 million. We're pretty proud of that number. That's a very strong number. It reflects us taking a lead after a book one position on a very high number of transactions. The absolute number of offerings last year at 58, that's a pretty muted year. Typically, in a more active year of IPOs and follow-ons, that's going to be well north of 100, but we're pleased that in a slower year from a capital markets perspective. We're still able to achieve such a strong average fee. At the center of our Global Equities business is our equity research product. One of our equity research analysts is sitting in the room [indiscernible]. And that's what we're really known for in that business. And within equity research, our niche, our focus, our definition, it's mid-cap, small and mid-cap equity research very much with a domestic focus. So the vast majority of our equity research will be on companies sub-$10 billion market cap typically $1 billion to $10 billion, and that's just where we differentiate versus the larger bulge bracket, the wirehouse firms we tend to focus on large cap companies, and we're extremely highly ranked with that network. We're typically traditionally top 3, often top 2 ranked for mid-cap research. Most of our strategy and what we do in equities is building other products and capabilities that leverage the relationships with those equity restricted project enables our institutional investors. So as you see us talk about introducing a high touch versus low touch, which is electronic trading, global program trading, options trading, a lot of that is focused on taking advantage of the relationships. Our equity research allows us to establish with institutional investors and working to penetrate those clients with additional products. We've got 50 analysts covering close to 1,000 companies in the United States, and that's supported by 65 salespeople almost 20 traders. Fixed income capital markets is one of very few businesses within a whole of Raymond James, where we can definitively say, we are #1 in what we do, amongst middle market fixed income sales and trading firms, we are the #1 firm by market share by revenues -- salespeople and number traders and have been for several years. We are particularly effective in the depository segment. There's 2 aspects of fixed income sales and trading business. They are servicing small, midsized community and regional banks who are very active in trading bonds typically to match duration within their portfolios. Less to achieve optimal yield or to make sure their balance sheet durations are matched. We are excellent and market-leading at that. The second aspect of that business is what we call the total return business, which services more yield-focused accounts, credit investment managers, insurance companies, strong in that business, but that's an area we have a lot of opportunity to grow, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about. Public finance sits within our fixed income business, but it's really an investment banking like service. This is the underwriting of bonds for state and local government agencies typically to support some sort of project for airports, utilities, for building roads, building schools. We've been growing this business very nicely. We've been adding a lot of very good bankers, climbing the lead tables. We're #8 in this business last year, surpassed a number of our direct peers. All the firms ahead of us, we would consider to be bulge bracket or wirehouse type of players. So we've established a really strong position in this market, very synergistic with our fixed income sales and trading business where the trading of the municipal bonds is one of their strongest capabilities. So the issuance from public finance secondary market trading from fixed income complement each other really nicely allow us to compete effectively. We've also been propelled to be able to grow this business by some of our competitors exiting this business. Citi very publicly decided to exit this business a little over a year ago. We added about 12 senior bankers from that team, a number of whom are very, very strong, put us into some new geographies, added some new product capabilities, really hit the ground running or helping drive some -- seeing in that business. Affordable housing is maybe a bit of a below the radar screen business from a lot of investors, I'm guessing, but it's a pretty neat business and creates some interesting growth opportunities. Simply stated, what this business does is helps property developers leveraging some tax incentives provided by the government, whereby if you invest in portions of the equity of an affordable housing development, you get a tax deduction for those investments. So our affordable housing business helps syndicate those tax equity investments to investors looking to take advantage of those tax credits very frequently, those tax credits are marketed to banks who were mandated through the CRA or Community Reinvestment Act to reinvest a portion of their earnings back in the communities in which they operate. These affordable housing tax credits are a big way to do this. This is another business we're actually #1 in this market. Very nice business, very profitable, and we're now leveraging that capability, taking advantage of the same tax credit investing opportunity that exists in the renewables market. I'll come back and spend a bit more time on that. And then lastly, the other component of the segment is RGL, which is our Canadian business. Actually, operationally, it doesn't -- isn't managed as part of the rest of the capital markets business that I have responsibility for, but reports up into it. And it's effectively a captive Canadian version of most of what I've described. They don't have all the components we have. It's largely in equities and investment banking business. But [indiscernible] equity professionals doing research and creating stocks of Canadian company and working on Canadian investment banking transactions, often on a cross-border basis together with our U.S., counterparts. We've been able to grow the overall top line from '19 to '24 to 6% compound annual growth rate. I was asking if I could show this chart through '21 or '22, when that number was closer to $1.9 billion. Unfortunately, I couldn't do that. But we have achieved almost $2 billion of revenue [Technical Difficulty] little bit of an air pocket in the markets in '23 and '24. We did see nice growth in '24 over '23. Really started off the year very strongly. The first 6 months of the year, we're up almost 35% year-over-year. Within the overall capital markets business, our September and December quarters were our third and fourth best quarters in our history in the Capital Markets business overall. I was sitting here in January, I would have told you we're up into the right and the recovery is here and that type of growth will be sustained or perhaps even approved upon as the year progresses. But everything that's happened with tariffs has had a pretty dampening impact on the M&A market and it brought a lot of the deals in process, either making deals on process, put them to the sidelines and cost a lot of other deals in backlog to wait for some clarity around that whole picture before transactions can resume. So we do expect some slowing in that type of growth rate as we go throughout the year, but feel extremely positive on the potential for that type of growth or better to repurchase a lot of that tariff slowdown. How we compete, how we differentiate the comments that Paul and Tash made between best of both worlds. That very much applies in our business as well. The way we like to compete the way we position ourselves is offering all of the product, global capabilities, service capabilities of a bulge bracket firm, but very much focused on the middle market. You can see our average deal size is about $250 million, typically focused on within the banking business. The company is between $100 million and $750 million in value. We bring bulge-bracket capabilities, but with intense senior banker focus and attention on those opportunities, typically with 2 managing directors focusing on those transactions, we don't outsource execution to more junior bankers, our senior bankers drive those transactions. We lead with advice, very different from saying that we lead with capital. I'd just say we are not ever working with our partners, Raymond James Bank to provide capital to our clients where that can provide a further edge, but it's definitely not how we compete and we lead with sector expertise and advice. We've been fortunate to experience very low turnover across all of our businesses from a senior producer perspective. And I'd attribute that to a few things. I think we're known for having a very entrepreneurial culture, very meritocratic. I think I'm probably a good example of that having come in from an acquisition, been able to establish some good things and be promoted throughout the organization. We've seen a number of folks like that where you find bankers who've been here for 20, 30 years. You also find people who are able to ascend and be very successful and they prove themselves very capable very quickly. So it's a true meritocracy, very respectful and very collaborative. A lot of people come here who have been at another firms and say, well, we have all the capabilities of sophistication, but it's just much more culturally pleasant place to work [Technical Difficulty]. Again, very similar to some of the things you've heard from Tash about our PCG business. The growth orientation of our business is an attraction to a lot of people, and I'll come back and talk about relationship with the wealth management business and the Private Client Group and Raymond James Bank, which are also capabilities, a lot of our direct competitors, peers don't have or don't do nearly as well as we do. That's how we're growing the business. Up left, within investment banking, it's continuing to do a lot of what we've been doing successfully over the last several years, recruiting and acquiring to deepen and expand our capabilities and footprint. We've been pretty successful thus far on the acquisition front. We've completed 5 acquisitions over the last several years. I score us pretty highly in terms of how those acquisitions have gone, our ability to retain the teams, grow their businesses once they're part of Raymond James and have a broader network of colleagues, products and services that they can offer. We're going to continue to do that. We often view acquisitions, particularly boutiques and recruiting fungibly whereas if we're looking to expand in a certain sector, we're typically evaluating opportunities to acquire business or recruit an individual to build a team or to bring a team over and choosing whatever sort of the most actionable and expedient path. In many cases where there is an acquisition opportunity, that can get us faster but that's not always an option in situation. So we're going to continue to do acquiring and build out our capabilities. In our fixed income business, we have a lot of opportunities to leverage that client footprint, #1 market position, I mentioned to add some more capabilities. I'll drill down on that a little bit. Within the equities business, it's really leveraging research platform that 50 research analysts covering 900 companies, thousands of institutional investor relationships that research business that empowers with additional products to capture wallet share from our institutional clients. And then within the affordable housing, the tax credit business. We recently acquired a business. It's actually an acquihire that we did of a business called TREK that effectively does something very similar to what we do in the affordable housing market in the renewable space to take advantage of the same tax credit syndication opportunities that are available in the renewables market and housing business, investing a lot behind that business. And we think over time, provided we have favorable regulatory backdrop to be able to do that. The opportunity exists for that business to be even larger in years down the road that our affordable housing business is today. Going to talk of recruiting and deepening our investment banking capabilities and footprint couple of things I mean by that. Within -- we have some practices to put consumer financial, industrial are the examples of practices that are fairly built out and develop and these are $100 million to $200 million-plus revenue practices inside of Raymond James. In many cases, our work over the last several years has focused on filling in white space. So you take a sector like industrials, just to give one example, if you roll back the clock 5 years ago, we would have only covered 2 or 3 of the 10 sectors what people would consider to be core middle market investment banking sectors. We wouldn't have coverage of packaging or the chemical sector, for example. Now we've added a banker in most cases and a team covering those spaces, but best-in-class in many of those sectors is having 3, 4, 5 senior bankers covering those spaces, having 20 cover those spaces versus teams of 3 or 4. So a lot of our work in those sectors is taking areas we've established a presence and had some success and expanding that footprint to take more share from our competitors who have a deeper history in some of those sectors. And in almost every one of these subverticals within those more established practices, we have a lot of opportunities to do so. Then we have other practices that are newer to us or earlier on the maturity curve. Health care, in particular, biotech, private capital advisory, which is the private equity fund placement and secondary advisory business that we established through the acquisition of a business called [indiscernible] a few years ago, institutionally focused private placements, which is a brand-new effort we just established earlier this year, restructuring where we can say we planted a flag. We have a footprint, but we're very far today from being the best version of ourselves and what we could ultimately look like. And so there's tremendous upside to grow those businesses. And then lastly, expanding globally. Not dramatically, but Paul mentioned Paris earlier. We have a very strong European investment banking presence. It's been a great growth story for us, operate today from London and Germany. We've done a few deals in the French market. Had some relationship that allowed us to win those. But in order to really capitalize on the French investment banking opportunity, which, by the way, is the second largest wallet in Europe. It's actually second behind the U.K., larger than the German market. You're not going to fully crack that market. You don't have French folks on the ground in Paris competing. So in order to take advantage of that, we're opening a Paris office in the very near future here, hired a banker who's going to build out a team. I can see us doing that in other markets such as the Nordics, other places where we've had some success, but we can have even more success if we establish more of a beachhead there. So we're always looking for opportunities to expand that geographic coverage where it can really move the needle for us and leverage success that we've already had. We did top over $1 billion in investment banking revenue in both '21 and '22. We've been very consistently growing our managing director headcount. Ultimately, this business is a product of number of revenue-producing managing directors times productivity, average revenue per managing director drive the success of that business. We have 135 MDs in our business today. Most of those, if you break down where they came from, the #1 source of how those folks came to be managing directors of Raymond James would be promotions from within. That will be more than 50% of our managing directors were promoted internally. Started here in some cases as analysts, associates, VPs, but ultimately were promoted up to the managing director level. Second would be through acquiring -- I'm sorry, recruiting from other firms, that would be the second largest. And then the third would be acquisitions. So while we've had success hiring the #1 and #2 sources of MD growth within our Capital Markets [indiscernible] has been developing talent internally and acquiring very similar to the PCG business in that regard, and that's something we're going to continue to do. Peak productivity from a revenue per managing director standpoint, things were really blowing and going in 2021. We hit almost $10 million of revenue per MD. I wouldn't tell you that's a target. I'd say it's an aspirational target, but it's probably not the most likely a realistic target for me to have, where historically, [indiscernible] has been operating sort of in the $5 million of revenue per MD. That's in a somewhat depressed activity level. I would say over the next few years, as activity levels recover, we would hope to see that number be in sort of the $7 million to $8 million of revenue per MD. That together with continuing to grow that MD headcount and retaining productive folks who are with us [indiscernible] investment banking [indiscernible]. Within fixed income and equity, a couple of things you should expect to see us invest in our structured products business. This would be things like mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities, CLOs that will actually be within our fixed income business. That and municipal bonds are our 2 largest trading businesses. Structured products will actually be, for the first time in its history, our #1 fixed income trading business behind munis, first time it will surpass munis. And we have a very strong secondary trading capability. We have a somewhat nascent origination capability. And as I was describing earlier, when I talked about public finance, the origination and secondary trading very much complement one another, and we think we have a tremendous opportunity to invest in the development of origination of structured products, success there will leverage the existing footprint we have in secondary products trading and both those businesses can make each other better. I think there's a lot of upside in that area for us. Electronic trading is important on both the equity and the fixed income side. On the equity side, that's been built organically. We have a product called RJET, Raymond James Electronic Trading that's been built internally organically, homegrown electronic trading solution, leveraging a third-party provider, but that's grown from 0 to meaningful revenue to us and driving nice growth in our equities business. In fixed income, you might recall, we acquired a business called SumRidge Partner, electronic market maker in the bond world, really sort of cutting-edge technology. And as we integrate that electronic trading capability with our traditional high-touch bond trading capability, offer both of those to clients that the marriage of those 2 sales efforts that's really going to drive a lot of growth in client wallet and be differentiated, particularly in the middle market because nobody else in the middle market has a comparable electronic fixed income trading capability to what we acquired with SumRidge. You've seen this chart a couple of times, but I'll expand a bit on how the capital markets business works with other parts of the firm. There's a lot of -- Tash touched on this, but there's a lot of work we do with the Private Client Group. Probably 15%-ish of our investment banking business comes from referrals from the Private Client Group. Every time there's a capture a [indiscernible] successful transaction, there's an opportunity for the wealth management team to capture those assets when there's a successful transaction. And that sort of loop and that ecosystem is something I think we do better than anybody else within the others. There are other firms that have a wealth management and investment banking business and try to do this. And we have a team that focuses intensely on this. And we have both financial advisers and bankers who join us from other firms that try to do this. And we very consistently hear, "Wow, you guys have sort of cracked the code on this." You've figured out how to build trust between these advisers and the bankers to really drive success here. And I think it's something we're really proud of the success that we have and the relationship between many of our advisers and our bankers. Steve Raney talked about how we've developed a joint venture with Eldridge [indiscernible] to provide the provision of credit to our private equity clients. Again, that's distinctive relative to many of our middle market peers who don't have that capability, who don't have the ability to commit capital on a lead agent basis to transactions where they're involved. The joint venture we have with Eldridge and Raymond James Bank is allowing us to do that, and that's really resonating in the market and differentiating us from competitors who don't have that capability. I'll close with this. One of the things that gets me really excited. If you look at what's happened and really the upside [indiscernible] from an M&A market perspective, from 2015 to 2024, our market share increased from 0.8% to 1.4%. Accompanying that growth of market share was about a fourfold increase in our advisory revenues, and that's because we were increasing our share of a growing market. But I look at that and say, 0.8% to 1.4%, that's great. That still means there's 98.6% of the market available to us. So while we're very excited about the growth we've had, never say unlimited upside, but there's tremendous upside to continue to grow our share of the M&A, penetrate new transaction types, continue to move up market. There's tremendous opportunity. We could quadruple this business again and still be single-digit percentage market share. So that's one of the biggest focus for us is continue to take share in the M&A market. I asked often about margins. We're not blessed with a high degree of recurring revenue. A result of that, our margins tend to be more volatile than other parts of Raymond James. Our peak in 2021 and 2022 was -- almost 30% in '21, north of 22%, almost 23% in 2022. [indiscernible] you not to see that replicated. That was a perfect nirvana of intense transaction activity with nobody traveling, no conferences, so people weren't even on plane. So that's unlikely to be repeated that you can generate that type of revenue without spending any money on business development. And I would say, if you look at full-service peers, you look at what their margins are in what I call a good market environment, they tend to be in the 14% to 17% across our capital markets business. That's, I think, a good and reasonable target for us to have. If you look at our first 2 quarters, we were better than our first quarter of this year, a little worse than that in the second quarter as activity started to slow, particularly towards the second half of the quarter, blended to 12.6%. I think that's a reasonable margin expectation for us to have in a good market as a full-service business.

Devin Ryan, Citizens JMP. I want to ask about the private capital market overall and then kind of how you guys are positioned. It seems like very hot theme right now, but there's a secular trend of just capital flows into private capital. So I think you guys acquired was Siebel in 2021. But outside of kind of the primary fundraising side of the equation, where are you guys with respect to continuation vehicles or kind of thoughts around secondaries advisory, where is that within Raymond James today, if at all? And then how are you thinking about just that broader opportunity as maybe a growth engine for you?

So I'd say a couple of things. One, we acquired Siebel because private equity is a core strategic growth focus for us in recruiting from everything we do. As I said, we don't have a lot of recurring revenue, but private equity can represent our recurring relationships. If you can build strong relationships with private equity firms, they will find ways to compensate you on a somewhat consistent basis. So we're trying to cement ourselves, attach ourselves to private equity firms and become one of their -- if not their top 1, 2 or 3 most important relationships for everything that they do and we feel like that will be reported. Siebel was a big part of that because they're very effective. From the time we acquired that business to last year, their revenues grew roughly fourfold. We've expanded their headcount. And a big part of the investment, they had success doing both primaries and secondaries. I mean, continuation vehicles and LP secondary are 2 flavors of secondaries as you acknowledge, continuation vehicles, which are secondaries focused on the GP, private equity from itself or LPs where LPs are looking for [indiscernible]. We do both of those. We've done 16 secondaries over the last 12 months. We are seeing a lot of traction there. We've just hired a banker to further bolster our secondaries practice in the U.S., actually just started this week. I was with him at the Private Equity Conference in Germany this week. A big part of how we're differentiating is back to the collaboration point versus just being a pure secondary adviser, marrying industry coverage with the CV in the industrial space, the tech space, partnering secondary transaction structuring experts with industry bankers who can help investors understand the asset or the assets that are within that. Those businesses should be valued position. That's how we're going to market. We're having good success. I mentioned 16 deals. We still think if we look at best-in-class peers within that whole market of PCA or private capital advisory, primary and secondary, it's not hard to see. We have peers we can see in public disclosures that are 4 or 5x our size. So while we've quadrupled the business in a few years -- quadrupling again would sort of catches up with sort of those best-in-class peers. So we see a ton of upside and secondaries are a huge part of that. And that's why again, we just added a senior banker in this space.

Michael Cyprys, Morgan Stanley. I was hoping maybe you could elaborate on that 15% of the investment banking business that you're getting from referrals from PCG. Can you speak to the connectivity that you have, the sort of drivers of success? Where do you think you can take that 15% to as you look out over the next 5 years? You mentioned the team that you have set up. Can you talk about how that team is resourced, sort of their role and how they contribute to that?

Sure. So we spend a lot of time on this, so I'll try to hit it efficiently. But we have a team that sits within investment banking, we call it our business development team, a senior team, all of whom have experience as investment bankers in prior experience. They spend a tremendous amount of time going to many of the events that our private client group hosts where advisers gather. So conferences -- we spend a lot of time making presentations about what an investment banking transaction entails, what types of transactions we work on, what are the characteristics to look for in your clients, Mr & Mrs Financial Advisor, what types of characteristics of your business owner clients represent good prospects for us, training them about how to open that conversation, what are the types of questions to ask and then very quickly encouraging them to bring those opportunities where they identify them to our business development team, which is sort of the first level of screen to get on the phone with the adviser and then the business owner client to qualify the opportunity, make sure it fits with us. So if it doesn't fit with us, we have a network of firms who can refer those out to for whatever reason to the sector or size that fit with us. But a lot of it's about education of the advisers, getting them comfortable and confident to have that conversation with their business owner client and getting the advisers to trust the investment bankers to introduce them to their clients. And once investors have a taste of that success, it's a home run. We share a percentage of the success fee back with the advisers. But importantly, when their client sells a business, they convert illiquid asset, i.e., an ownership stake in a privately held business through liquid asset, part of their AUM. So it's a pretty powerful 1, 2 punch for the adviser. And we have a lot of advisers who've had success with that, get on stage at these events and give sort of live testimonials for how impactful this has been on their business. So we put a lot of attention on this. In terms of how big it could be, I have sort of a constant push-pull with the team that leads this because I would like it to continue to be 15% of a growing [indiscernible]. I don't want a bunch of bankers sitting around waiting for the phone to ring from an adviser for a transaction. They need to be out hunting for their own transactions, but the real power of being an investment banker with Raymond James should be if you would find 4 transactions on your own out in the market from your own business development activities. Well, if you're an investment banker at Raymond James, there will probably be one incremental opportunity, one incremental transaction that will come to you from the wealth management channel. So I think that 10% to 20% is the right range, but very much expect that to be part of a [indiscernible].

Mike Brown from Wells Fargo Securities. Looking at Page 63 and 64, you've got a very broad breadth of capabilities across the entire business. Just curious what's on your wish list from a capability standpoint when you think about inorganic growth? And then specifically in the advisory business, where is the best white space opportunities today?

Both combination is on my wish list. But Susan, I think about that in 3 vectors. We have a lot more we could do in sort of that core private company M&A space. We can double or triple that without having to really reinvent what we do at all just by plugging 20 more industrial bankers tomorrow, take share without stepping on each other's toes and grow that capability. A couple of areas where we are more aspirationally focused would be areas that would represent part of that 98.6% of the M&A market that we're not capturing, the advisory market. A lot of that would be public company M&A. We do some of that. There's hundreds of millions of revenue opportunity that is generally not what we're pursuing today. It's a pretty specialized capability, the type of thing you'd probably be more likely to acquire than build organically, skill set to be a public company banker different than a private company banker. So that's something I have my eye on for something to be more impactful and open up a whole new revenue wallet. The restructuring market, we have a restructuring team. We're happy with its performance. But again, if I study some of our peers and the revenues they generate from restructuring, there's hundreds of millions of dollars of upside. Again, the type of thing that would perhaps be more likely to come to us inorganically than organically, although we have been growing it closely.

All right. Moving right along. Next up, we have Butch Oorlog. Butch is our current CFO, a role he took on just at the end of 2024. Prior to that, he held a number of leadership roles within the finance organization, most recently Chief Accounting Officer. Please welcome, Butch Oorlog.

Good afternoon. Good to be here. And I want to start out by first thanking you all, as Paul did, for being here, coming here and investing your time in Raymond James. We appreciate your interest, and we do not take it for granted. I want to start by saying we, at Raymond James, have a long track record of producing solid financial results. And we start there with rooted in the core values that Paul mentioned. And we're going to talk about our ability to generate operating leverage over time. We're going to talk about our strong balance sheet, and we're going to talk about our consistent capital priorities, which are focused on growth. But all of those and our ability to achieve and produce consistent results are all rooted back in our core values, which are centered and focused on our clients and doing what's best for them. And really, the financials reflect that story and demonstrate it end-to-end and is at the core and at the root of everything we do. Starting with our track record on operating revenues, our operating leverage. This chart, we demonstrate 11% 5-year compound annual growth rate on consolidated net revenues. And what I want to point out here is consistent growth in net revenues each and every year. And we think about the economic environments that we were operating these businesses in these years; '20 and '21, pandemic, near 0 interest rate environment; '22 and '23, we have increasing interest rates. And then, of course, in '24, we have the easing cycle begins. Because of our diverse and complementary businesses, we're able to produce revenue growth in each of those years and in each of those environments. And that's unique to the businesses of Raymond James. I'll also point out here for the first 6 months of the fiscal year, we've been able to continue that growth trajectory with 13% year-over-year growth for that 6-month period. So we're off to a good start in FY '25. Coupled with that revenue growth, we have a highly variable cost expense model. I'll just point out 61% of our consolidated expenses are PCG financial adviser compensation and incentive compensation. So as revenues move up or down, those expenses are going to move up and down and are part and parcel to one of the reasons that Paul is able to talk about our 149 consecutive quarters of profitability. It's the nature under which our business is constructed and built. Also point out in our total compensation expenses are about 81% of our total expenses, leaving 19% of our expenses to be non-compensation expenses. And even within that bucket, we have elements of those expenses that are highly variable and move and scale up or down with our revenues, levers we can pull. Examples are our recruiting expenses as we invest more in recruiting and grow our businesses. Those would tend to increase in our business development line. And also even within our other expense categories. We have things like FDIC insurance. So as our bank deposit balances grow and our FDIC insurance premiums increase, that would be reflected and scale with the growth in the business. Marrying those 2 concepts together, we're able to demonstrate the positive effect of generating operating leverage. You'll notice our consolidated pretax income grew at 14% over that 5-year period compared to the 11% growth in net revenues, demonstrating the consistent development of increasing operating leverage in our businesses. I also want to point out -- that's on a GAAP basis. So we're able to demonstrate that clear financial performance. We also present our adjusted pretax basis. But the nature of our adjustments are pretty minor in terms of the adjustments we make. So our constituencies and stakeholders can really clearly understand on a GAAP basis what all these businesses are performing. Last thing I want to point out on this slide is we have a track record of increasing our pretax margin. We were able to create a 20.6% pretax margin in fiscal '24. And that margin is still over 20% in '25 in the first quarter. Shifting to the -- with that strong P&L performance, coupled with the disciplined management of our balance sheet, which we'll review in a minute, we're able to demonstrate a consistent level of very solid returns on common equity. You'll notice over a 5-year period, those returns ranging from 17% to 19.5% as a return on common equity and a return on tangible common equity north of 20% in each of those periods. I also want to point out that we're able to produce those returns with very conservative levels of capital in our business. So even though we have conservative levels of capital, we're still able to produce those returns. Moving on to the balance sheet. As Steve mentioned in his remarks, the total firm's balance sheet is $83.1 billion as of March 31, '25. When you compare that to the balance sheet as of September 30, it was about roughly in the same place about $83 billion. So we haven't had overall balance sheet growth. But as Steve mentioned, we have had growth in our loans. We've just been able to fund that growth with other assets, cash and securities decreases that we use. But we do see that $83 billion growing -- starting to grow back once we get to the end this calendar year. Also note that we have $2.5 billion of cash at our parent. That's our liquidity measure. And our target level for cash at the parent is $1.2 billion, which is a pretty conservative target. So we have about $1.3 billion of excess liquidity at our parent that is available to invest in our businesses and in these strategic opportunities that you've heard described today. I also want to point out, Paul mentioned our Tier 1 leverage ratio of 13.3%. We operate with a target level of 10%, which is still 2x the regulatory minimum. So 10% is a conservative target level and with our current position at 13.3% of Tier 1 leverage, that equates to about $2.7 billion of excess capital, that we can deploy in our business to fund the growth initiatives that you heard described today. Last point I want to make on this slide is our A rated credit agencies, credit rating from each of the credit rating agencies. I want to point out that those rating agencies just completed. Each of them have completed their annual review within the last couple of months and affirm their ratings and affirm their stable outlooks. In terms of our liability and capital side of our balance sheet, we have a very simple liability and capital side structure. You'll notice that the majority of those liabilities are in bank deposits, Steve described for you are diversified funding sources and our goal is to continue to diversify the funding sources. But I do want to highlight the 86% of those bank deposit balances are FDIC insured with 95% of those balances at Raymond James Bank specifically, be an FDIC insured. And again, I'm going to go back to our core values, we're able to do that through our BDP program and our third-party bank structure. And that's not easy to do. But we do that because that's what's best for our clients. And it provides us the opportunity to provide a differentiated level of service to our clients. I also want to point out on this slide and Paul mentioned our senior notes, very small percentage portion of those liabilities. But with an average maturity remaining on those notes, of 19 years. We have a long runway before those maturities. They are at low-cost instruments. And so they provide good value and the next maturity date, the earliest maturity date for the first tranche under the senior notes doesn't arise for 5 years. So we have 5 years before that first tranche matures. In terms of funding, this was a topic for many years, of course. Our PCG client cash balances continue to provide stable, low-cost funding source to the bank. We heard Steve talk about the unique nature of those funding sources to our bank. But what you notice here is that over the last couple of years, those funding levels and suite program balance levels have stabilized. So cash sorting, I would say we haven't necessarily declared cash sorting over, but it certainly seems to be -- we concluded it to be less prevalent and -- than it had been for many, many years. We won't conclude that the sorting dynamic is over until we see those sweet balances grow, and we would expect them to grow proportionally to the growth in client assets. At that point, I think we'll be -- we would conclude that sorting is over. We're not there yet, but certainly a stable environment. In terms of our consistent capital priorities focused on growth. Our capital priorities have not changed. Our first goal and objective in deploying capital is in support of top line growth, organic growth investments. And you've heard Jim talk about a number of those sorts of investments as he talked about different MDs that we brought on over the years. That's an example of organic growth, capital deployment and investments. They're not always acquisitions in that space. Same in terms of financial advisers, investing in the recruiting efforts and everything that it takes to support the growth of these financial buyers, that's organic growth. And so there are many examples of what that organic growth looks like and we've heard from different leaders today, what the opportunities are for us going forward. The last element in that organic growth investment, and we're going to hear from Ben and Andy in a minute, on our IT, strategic IT investments, which is another area where we're making investments and deploying that in our growth. To the extent that at the next tier in our capital deployment priorities, is for M&A, acquisitions. And Paul mentioned what our criteria is for those. After that, we will continue to provide dividends on our common stock. Our dividend payout ratio is about 20% to 30%. That's our -- that's our targeted range. As of the beginning of this fiscal year, we increased our dividend to $0.50 per share. That's an 11% increase in our dividend, but that keeps us -- still keeps us down in the low end, 20% to 30% dividend payout ratio range. In addition to the payment of dividends, we remain committed to repurchase the shares to offset share-based compensation. And finally, we will make other share repurchases in addition to the share-based comp dilution repurchases. Since fiscal '19, we've returned $5.1 billion to shareholders through either dividends or the share repurchases. In terms of our recent communications, and when i say recent, I go back to the beginning of the fiscal year, we talked about as we continue to see that Tier 1 leverage ratio grow. We talked about accelerating the amounts of our -- increasing the amount of our dividends -- excuse me, of our share repurchases, and we actually executed on that. And then in the most recent earnings period, we provided guidance to size that level of share repurchases in the $400 million to $500 million a quarter range. And at that level, that's just providing us basically stability. We're not further growing our Tier 1 leverage ratio at repurchases at that level from the 13% range that it currently sits. So even though we're deploying capital at that $400 million to $500 million a quarter range. It doesn't negatively impact our ability to have plenty of excess capital available to us to support and grow in the organic opportunities or strategic opportunities. It's just to maintain -- it's basically keeping us from further growing that Tier 1 leverage ratio from that level. Next up, we'll talk about our financial targets. I'm sure that you'll note that these targets are unchanged from last year and last year was unchanged from the year before. They still represent appropriate levels. We try to be conservative when we evaluate these targets. So we certainly hope that we are able to outperform these targets. But based upon our key assumptions and the current equity markets and short-term interest rate environment. We believe these to continue to be appropriate targets. So adjusted comp ratio of 65% or less, adjusted pretax margin of 20% or higher, adjusted return on common equity of 17% or higher and adjusted return on tangible common equity of 20% or higher embedded in these targets. They reflect the consistent share repurchases at the level that I just described. Similarly, in terms of the long-term capital targets as discussed our Tier 1 leverage target of 10% and we're not changing that target level. So over time, over the long run, we do expect to operate the businesses at that 10% target level. We also haven't updated -- did not change our corporate cash liquidity at the parent target of $1.2 billion. And in terms of the total debt-to-book capital ratio, Paul mentioned that our current is 32% is really a limit. We're currently operating at 15% total debt, which is mostly senior notes to the book capital ratio, that provides us plenty of capacity to go out and raise debt capital in order to further create liquidity to invest in our businesses. So with the combination of our excess -- with our liquidity on hand with our additional capital ready to deploy, we have the funding capacity and the ability to pursue the strategies that you've heard from our business leaders earlier today. And with that, we fully -- we expect to be generating at least $20 billion in net revenues by 2030. So with that, I'll open it up for questions.

Devin Ryan Citizens JMP. One just on kind of bringing together all the points on customer cash and some stabilization there. What Steve spoke about with the expectation for the balance sheet to grow and the NIM stabilizing. Can you give us a sense of like how you're thinking about net interest income growth over the next couple of years and some of the puts and takes there? Because there's still a little bit of room on deposit rates, it seems to come down. So it'd be great to get an update on how you're thinking about that for the firm.

Yes. So we'll continue to grow. We have plans to continue to grow our securities-based loans. We've heard that discussed and also our residential mortgage. So really, really focused on using our capacity and balances to support our client focus lending needs first and foremost. And then to the extent that spreads widen in the corporate loans and they're good risk-adjusted return opportunities, then we would become more active in those products.

I was hoping to dive into the $1 billion that's being spent on technology. When I look at your income statement, where is that showing up? Is that most -- because it doesn't -- it's really hard to disaggregate where that is. And maybe from your perspective, budgeting like a little bit more color around what the actual spend is?

Yes. So the dispersion of that $1 billion is across different line items and on our P&L. So there's a significant element of that is in compensation expenses for employee developers. We also utilize a lot of contract developers. And so -- but the contract developers would get included in the communication and information processing line. So it's not -- it's an aggregation and the equipment and the depreciation would be in the occupancy and equipment line. So it's -- there's not a clear clean way for you to look at the P&L and identify this as specific IT support.

Mike Cyprys, Morgan Stanley. You mentioned $20 billion by 2030. Maybe you could help unpack the building blocks or how you see the progression for in terms of the key contributors. What do you see as some of the biggest ones? And how do you see the mix of the business evolving over that time frame?

Yes. So it's -- that side, the output of a strategic planning process and many of those strategic plans and strategic initiatives are the foundation of what you are presented here by our different business leaders. So the way we think about it is, we see opportunities to grow our business in its same proportional form as today, that it is today is how we see growing in opportunities in 2030 in support of that total.

In terms of the repurchase activity in the $400 million to $500 million range. I hear your point about Tier 1 leverage kind of staying flat near term base of that level. But as we think about as always stated earlier about the balance sheet growth starting to kind of accelerate into fiscal '26 a little bit in 2027, that will start to kind of bleed down the Tier 1 leverage ratio. If you could continue on that $400 million to $500 million path. So just curious how you're thinking about, like, is there a buffer above the 10% level that you want to keep is it 200 basis points for flexibility around M&A. And so I'm just wondering, if $400 million to $500 million is the right way to think about penciling in over the next couple of years? Is that what should we think about just the normal course run rate? Or do you get down to a certain level where you would want to need optionality?

Yes. So we will be continually reevaluating that based upon the opportunities that we have. Our commitment is we don't want to continue to grow the Tier 1 leverage ratio from that point. And then our ideal, as we've said before, and focused on what our capital deployment priorities are, we really from there, from that level, want to deploy in organic growth and M&A opportunities. And we still believe that we'll have plenty of capacity to do that, to do the types of M&A that we've done in the past -- at today's current excess capital levels.

Ask another one on operating leverage. You talked at the beginning, kind of driving operating leverage. Obviously, the targets aren't changing, but we're not in maybe a perfect environment for every business. then you also talked about a lot of variable expenses, so kind of the revenues go up sort of with some of those expenses. So where do you see the opportunities for operating leverage as you kind of play this out over the next few years? Like where do you really leverage fixed infrastructure? And how much is from kind of slowing expense growth rate versus kind of accelerating the revenue growth rate?

Yes. I would say we just have demonstrated through our track record that we have the ability to manage that both, the top line growth and manage our expenses. And we do see -- you heard discuss the mention of adviser time as an example, and you're going to hear Andy and Vince to talk about some specific opportunities that we're pursuing. Although the purpose of them isn't necessarily to drive operating leverage. We do believe that a successful execution of many of those initiatives and adviser time as an example, will produce opportunities that will [indiscernible] our operating leverage going forward.

We probably better wrap it up there. We've got to move on. Thank you much. All right. So our last presenter, so we could try to stay on time here. Please help me welcome Vin Campagnoli and Andy Zopler. Vin is our Executive Vice President, of technology and operations and is responsible for managing all aspects of our technology and operations of the firm. And Andy is currently Chief Information Officer of the firm. So please help me welcome Vin and Andy.

Good afternoon, everybody. I guess on the last thing before the tour and then dinner. So I'm going to over a couple of slides. And primarily, what I'm going to try to cover is how we align technology with our business. Go through a handful of things of how that integrates, how we support our business going forward. Andy is going to come up and talk a little bit about the overview of our IT investment, where our focus area is on IT investment. We'll talk a little bit about the strategy, and we'll close with some of the work we're doing in AI, what we've implemented and what we're working on. But I'm going to start with a slide that you've seen a handful of times today and talk a little bit about -- we look at our business and technology to enable it. And you heard from each of the business segments about how they're interacting. Our architecture, our data platform, specifically our data platform, which we've put investment dollars in over the years, is there to support this type of integration. So a lot of that doesn't happen without technology, as you can imagine. You look at technology in financial services is clearly significantly important to every firm. At RJ, a lot of the discussion today was around technology. It is a big priority. It's a big priority on how we integrate what you see here and what we're doing going forward with each of the businesses. I'm going to touch on private client group specifically in this slide. For those that have heard me speak before, I talk a lot about building technology from the mind of the adviser. This slide is talking about the adviser, but where you see adviser, I could substitute an investment bank or a banker, someone in asset management or somebody in any one of the corporate functions. What we do, and we really believe it's our secret sauce, especially on the adviser side is we spend a lot of time with our advisers. Tash mentioned this morning that he was with our next-gen advisers. There's about 15 advisers in the other building that are literally sitting down with us and going through the things we're working on. And we literally have them writing requirements with us and how they work. Just imagine sitting over their shoulder, and watching how they spend their time, how do we save them time, how do we make them more productive. That is a really big focus of ours. We have a Technology Advisory Council that sits above them. goes across every one of our Private Client Group business, there's about 18 advisers across the U.S. They come in, we meet with them monthly. They come in twice a year. We drive requirements with them. We drive our prioritization with them. If you look up there, we are very focused on trying to build a platform that we feel is sophisticated, but simple to use that any one of them could use. So how do we know that we're doing a decent job with this. We survey our advisers. So on the left-hand side of this page is we just finished the survey, and we ask them about their technology satisfaction, and as you could see that was a 90% satisfaction rate. We also asked them about our service, which was also 90%. On the right side and i expect you to look at this slide and read it, but hopefully you have taken a look. This is -- we want to know from recruits. It's a great way for us to learn from somebody who just joined the firm. It could be from any firm. We want to know what they miss from their competitor, and it's a way of us potentially filling a gap. But we also want to know what do they think about our technology now that they've come here, they've come from the competition. And I love these three quotes. We ask them all to comment because it's a great way for us to do some fact finding. But if you look at these three quotes, they have similar comments and comments are around saving time, making them more efficient so that they can be more productive with their clients. And that goes back to the previous slide that I said of how we're building technology to support the adviser to support their business. So I'm going to turn it over to Andy. we'll both be here for Q&A. Again, he's going to start with just a brief overview of technologies, hopefully answer some of the questions that came up during the session.

Thank you, Vince. I appreciate it, and thank you all for your attention. As Vince said, let me just start with painting a little bit of a picture of our technology organization, as all the growth has been going on, on the firm that you heard each of the business leaders describing our technology organization has been expanding as well. I've talked quite a bit about the $1 billion number, rounding up slightly $975 million tech spend planned for this fiscal year. We have 1,900 associates in our IT organization globally, and we very much look and act as a global organization. St. Pete is certainly a major tech center for us from a work center perspective, where we actually operate now from 6 locations around the world for here in domestic U.S. We also leveraged Vancouver and London, which have turned out to be tremendous labor pools for us. We have businesses in those locations, but we actually have built up teams there to work on our enterprise across the board. Lot of discussion on AI, and I'm going to give some more details of what we're working on there in the business areas. But I really wanted to make sure you understood how effectively we're deploying AI in our software engineering activity. So in that population of 1,900, just under 600 of those individuals every day writing code with an AI Assistant, they are helping them do that. So we can actually measure that quite effectively. We're seeing 10% to 20% productivity gains in the coding activities of those individuals, relatively early days. But if you think about some of the activities that are typical for a software engineer, we're seeing really big gains as we bring new staff on, whether that's from turnover or -- we actually have a very successful early career program, our Accelerated Development Program. And in a large organization like ours, traditionally, it might take days or even weeks for a new software engineer whose experienced to get their head around the code base they're being asked to work for. And that's really one of the sweet spots we found with a large language model can dive into that code and summarize for the engineer -- these are what the functions do. These are the technical dependencies. And so that's saving a ton of time, just one example. And then finally, on the right-hand side there, just a summary of some awards and recognition activity over time. We have 10 years in a row, one industry award for our technology development in our Wealth Management space. And this year, actually, the Banking Insurance and Securities Association Award was actually for deploying innovative AI for financial advisers. Although I have to say for me, for our team, the kind of recognition that you heard from them from our financial advisers, that's what really matters the most to us. Are we solving problems for them. Are we creating opportunities for them? Are we buying them time back in their day. I'll talk a little bit more about some specifics of how we do that. If you look at that technology spend breakdown, you can see increases in that percentage-wise over the last 5 years and frankly, a similar story the last 5 years before that. Where are we focusing on that investment, been a lot of discussion of adviser productivity and buying them time back that same group of next-gen advisers, I had dinner with last night, tremendous roundtable discussion of how they're leveraging AI. Simple examples, we actually were an early mover in making generative AI available across the firm. That was 14 months ago. more recently, still a relatively early mover in financial services of making -- meeting summary, generative AI available. That's buying them back 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 hours a week, which is there then plowing back into prospecting, into relationship building into growing NNA. So you can really clearly see the benefits there. And the investment in that space is obviously not just all AI and it's not just all in Private Client Group. We just rolled out a new collaboration platform for all of Jim Bunn's investment bankers. For example, give them the best state-of-the-art tools and available on their mobile platform. So that's meeting with great success. We are ramping up investment in our Asset Management area. We have great projects going on in the Banking segment. So really widespread distribution of those investment dollars. We talked a ton about artificial intelligence. I will show a couple of specific examples in a second. Cybersecurity is an ongoing area of focused investment. My first 9 years here, I ran the Information Security Program. So it's certainly near and dear to my heart. And afterwards, we're going to go upstairs to see our Cyber Threat Center, another version of best of both worlds that was told to me when I joined here is, we're big enough to matter, but small enough to get things done. And so with the right investments in cybersecurity and the right nimbleness of our team, we have an absolute world-class cybersecurity capability here. I touched on globalization and things we're doing to be more effective from an enterprise technology perspective, we certainly want to continue to support the entrepreneurial spirit, the independent spirit at Raymond James. But we also, as we get larger and more sophisticated, have opportunities to frankly save the firm money, provide better service, standardize solutions. So an easy example would be licensing fact set across the firm used to be done by business area. We went to an enterprise licensing scheme, great volume discounts, saved our Canadian business almost 50% on their license costs for FactSet. So quite a bit of that going on across the enterprise. And then last, but it shouldn't be least is, investment in solutions that are helping make sure we meet the regulatory bars that we have to meet. So we're really operating now and thinking about the capabilities that we need to deliver to support the business strategies that you heard before. I'll just focus for 1 minute on those five, what we call strategic levers. I would argue, when we think about IT 2030, the capabilities that we need in our organization. We have to be world class in those five domains. That's the demand on our technology organization so that we continue to support the business success of Raymond James. I touched on security and every financial services firm is certainly going to rate cybersecurity as a high priority. For us, though, we really take it a step further when we think about the anchor-to-business strategy. So again, back to the financial advisers at the core of their relationship with their clients is trust. So we think of that information security requirement as making sure that we don't do anything to [grade] that trust relationship between the adviser and the client. Digital service first. We're here primarily to take care of our business users, make sure they have the capabilities they need, they in turn, can take care of their clients. People, as we mentioned, core to our strategy and appropriately at the center of this chart, making sure we have the capabilities that are required. I mentioned our Early Career Program, we have really amazing levels of engagement, surveying our associates in IT and looking at engagement scores. We have super respectable attrition levels, mid-single digits far, far better than frankly any thing I think at previous firms where I've worked and a really, really engaged workforce. So that makes a huge difference for us. Data as an area, particularly as an enabler for AI is really -- has been a focus over the last 10 years and will continue to be high focus. I'm sure you've heard the expression data as the new oil. When we think about AI over time, today, we talk a lot about tooling and maybe which LLM is better than another LLM. The tooling will tend to converge over time to common capabilities. And the differentiator will be what proprietary data do you have to gain business insights as was mentioned before, that your competitors don't have. And so we even take data to that extent that we, again, in the PCG space, we've built our own proprietary CRM fully integrated with our whole wealth tech platform and our coaching advisers is enrich your CRM notes with as much information as you possibly can, that will be that adviser's oil and gaining unique insights on their client base over time. And then lastly, but not least, it's just a slightly different way of saying what Vince said. Our secret sauce is focusing on business value and alignment to our business areas and what do they need. Technologists, might shock you could get a little distracted by the latest sort of shiny toy and maybe want to play with the new technology. We stay really hyper focused on what solutions will generate business value. So that tagline, which should be trademark, thin cap and all the way designing technology from the mind to the adviser is really what it's all about for our technology team. Let's talk a little bit more about AI and give you some sense of where we're focused. But first, how are we thinking about this? Paul, [indiscernible] mentioned, the areas which we're focusing our AI efforts. Number one, driving operational excellence and operational efficiency. Even things we do in the back office, for example, we've deployed some really creative and very effective machine learning AI around our communications supervision capabilities. We've eliminated 50% of the human work in looking at those e-mails, but that also translates to less friction for the advisers because when the humans are going through those e-mails, there's a lot of back and forth with the advisers. What did you mean when you sent this e-mail to a client right? So by eliminating that workload certainly saves the supervision team quite a bit of time, but it also reduces friction for the advisers, so they can focus their time on their clients. Providing data-driven insights across the board, whether that's in PCG or other business areas, just finished a great pilot of some generative AI with our Asset Management, our portfolio managers, tremendous results in some cases, saying, "Hey, we frankly had an outsourced data analyst doing some of the grunt work for us, we can eliminate that. Now we can get this work more quickly and keep it in-house. A lot of examples like that. We've touched quite a bit about empowering advisers. And again, giving them time back to focus on their clients and growing their book. And we want to do all of that balancing, being forward-leaning in terms of innovation across the board, but staying within some very well-defined guardrails, both from a security and regulatory expectation standpoint. So when we look at our sort of board there and what we're focused on from an AI perspective. We are building some of our AI capabilities internally. We have a Center of Excellence in the technology department that's called Carillon Labs. They are both the engineering center of excellence as well as the User Education and Capability Center of Excellence. So these are some of the firms we're partnering with to build out capabilities, OpenAI and Microsoft being the primary two partners for building out our internally developed AI and ML use cases. And then we've actually established partnerships with the firms on the right. So we can do continuous and ongoing assessment of whether we're meeting the goals that I described before. Are we being as forward-leading as we can be, are we also staying in within sound guideposts, particularly in the regulatory space, there's some very high-level sort of statements about safety and security and AI. We really need to be constantly assessing, how are we interpreting that and what are our competitors and other industries look like in that space. So this has been really exciting to find the right strategic partners, who are willing to work with us, share feedback, make their solutions better, and there will be a lot of this ongoing. And then finally, looking at the pipeline we have of AI projects. We have, overall, just look internally, we have 10 AI use cases already in full production, providing value across the firm. We have a list here on the right. That's just a partial list. We actually have 35 use cases in full development right now, either in development or in testing and dozens more queued-up behind that as we prioritize those lists with our business areas. And then at the same time, again, if you look at our PCG business specifically, we do a lot of custom code development, about 80% of our leading wealth management tech platform is bespoke code that we've developed ourselves. But that still relieves room for external capabilities that we can integrate in the platform. And our rule of thumb as long as we can seamlessly integrate and again, just present a unified view and capabilities to our advisers, then we'll make that buy versus build decision, use case by use case, and move forward from there. So I think that is everything I wanted to cover. We'll see what questions there are in the group.

Michael Cho, JPMorgan. Andy, walk through the pace of spend over the weeks and years. I'm not asking for a forecast or anything. But how do you anchor the pace of tech spend when you go through your own business planning. Clearly, as the business has grown, there's some part of tech that's going to grow with that as well, that you just talked through. You have 35 different use cases. I'm sure there's hundreds more that you considered, how do you anchor the pace of tech spend there? And if I could just add a second one. If I think about the tech spend and you're at $1 billion today or $975 million, right? So from an operational capacity perspective, not asking about forecast, but today, what's the capacity of tech spend that you could be comfortable with an operational perspective above the $975 million?

I think in a way that the answer to both is actually the same in that our investment appetite is really established by Paul and the business leaders of how much technology investment do we want to make. We go through an annual process with the executive leadership team of establishing that at a high level and then looking at our investment by line of business. Many of which and we have multiyear solution road maps for each of our spaces. So, It's very seldom that there's a brand-new idea on the table versus something that, hey, we've already been thinking about how we're going to evolve the capability over time. So we start to dial in up or down the investment in each one of those slices of the pie, if you will, and then being very business case driven, if there's an opportunity that would necessitate us, dialing up capacity in a business area, that's a business decision. Now Michael, to your point, my job is to make sure we have the ability behind that. And I'll just say that there hasn't been a -- well, demand is insatiable, right. So if I said I had twice as much capacity there would probably still be demand. But within reason of what we want to deliver the business, we have not had a challenge, making sure we have the capacity to deliver. And the single biggest category, if you look at our year-over-year increase in technology spend, the single biggest category in that, around 35% is adding engineering capacity to our team, right? And so we've been very successful in our recruiting, very successful in our buildup of internal resources and never say never, but I'm not going to be the speed bump to delivering capability to the business. Does that answer your question?

Hey, Devin Ryan, Citizens JMP. Got a two parter here, but just based on what you either know in the market or hearing from advisers, where do you think you are relative to competition on implementing AI? I appreciate everyone's going to kind of built differently, but where you feel like you are? And then the second piece is you hear examples of bankers making their own pitch deck or analysts get gathering information in seconds, which could take an associate days to pull together or you gave the example for Asset Management. Do you see an opportunity down the road where this actually can bend the compensation curve? I know that's a big theme out there, but does that ever actually happen? Or you just make people more productive like what we obviously see here.

So to answer your first part of your question, where do we see ourselves competitively. We're super happy with where we are. I would say and thinking of ourselves as forward leaning. I think we're above the median in terms of embracing use cases and actually delivering -- while we see a lot of our competitors is there's a flashy press release, we talk to our industry contacts, and it turns out, well, I mean it's in pilot with 10 people, like oh, the press release certainly made it sound like everyone in the firm at it, right? We tend to do the opposite. Like, geez, maybe we really should put some publicity around the fact that we've rolled capability out. So as we talk to our industry contacts and as we talk to some of those partners, like a PwC, for example, like the McKenzie, what are you seeing out there? We actually feel really good about where we are. Now to your point, different business mixes and different competitors their focus might be more on a different business area, whereas we're not exclusively but heavily focused on PCG. In terms of what we can expect, the hype cycle around AI is insane, right? I mean there's a hype around technology, but it's insane. So certainly, in the software engineering space, you're hearing people saying, we'll turn everybody into a 10x developer. I know a 100x developer. I would like lets kind of come down to earth, right? The way I think of it, and this was actually sort of solidified with the advisers I was speaking to yesterday, if you can have a 1% increase in productivity each month by embracing tools whether it was AI or frankly other capabilities that we have. Think of a compounding effect, like that would be insane increased amount productivity improvement over a 5-year period. And I think that AI deployment will be much more than that. A lot of singles and doubles that the compound effect is tremendous versus a home run killer app that suddenly says, "Hey, we don't need junior analysts anymore. Certainly, our current landscape of AI tools really will not take a human out of the loop anytime soon. And so if we're wondering, is AGI general intelligence just around the corner where we could have the digital worker do it all. From my position, I would say, the capabilities aren't out there. We need a new architecture for AI that would get us to the point where we would say we don't need the human in the loop. So it's going to be the human with a powerful assistant maybe getting to the point with a human with a side kick who's almost as capable, but the human is still accountable. So I think that gets us to the kind of 2x level of productivity over a 3- to 5-year period. My humble opinion.

Michael Cyprys, Morgan Stanley. Just curious what learning you've had as you have implemented and put in place the 10 AI use cases into production as well as the pilot experiment. Maybe just talk to some of the best practices as you think about driving the success factors and what challenges that you have faced along the way, how you have came out?

Yes. So great question. What did we noticed from the best practices and sort of lessons learned in implementing some of the AI use cases we have. Number one is investing the time to bring the knowledge base of your associates up to an acceptable level, so they can really engage with the tools and understand what they're doing. There's a tendency to see a tool and want to roll it out very quickly. And then you can lose a lot of time upfront if they really don't understand tools, what they can, what they can't do. The example came up about investment banking analysts creating pitch decks. We're actually running parallel tests right now, pilots with a sort of niche commercial tool and an internally developed AI tool for that exact use case. So what we found was because of the nature of the tool, we spend a bit more time on the internal Gen AI tool with those bankers than we did with a third-party tool. And the third-party tool group in the early days looked like they were out ahead, but very quickly, the team that was using the internal tool started to move much quicker. And it really wasn't because the tool is better is because they actually understood it, a bit. So I think that's a huge takeaway for us. The importance of the human in the loop is probably the single biggest sort of takeaway and lesson learned has to be focused on. And I think the analogy again or the example would be individuals creating content with the AI in which there is no deterministic answer, can produce phenomenal results. So a fancy way of saying, if you're doing a client communication, you're going to be super happy with that letter. It's been tweaked and personalized to the information provided, let's say, about the client. And you're looking at that and saying, not only did I get it really quickly, but I really, really like this letter. Maybe I'm sort of having flashbacks to high school english class, but there's no right answer for that letter, right? It just looks really good versus doing a mathematical function and doing the type of analysis that we saw in some of these slides. You'd better be checking each and every one of those numbers. If it's LLM based, it's a probabilistic plausibly correct answer. It's not a deterministic exact answer. So I think making sure our users understand that -- and again, in some use cases, we're doing automated checking. But another use cases it's up to the user to make sure that the results are correct. All right. Thank you very much.

Well, that concludes our presentations today. So again, thank you all for attending in person. Thank you to those who have joined online as well. We do really value your attendance, and we certainly appreciate your interest in Raymond James. Thank you so much.