StepStone Group Inc. (STEP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Before we get started, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Taking of photographs and use to recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. That out of the way. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us at the Morgan Stanley Financials Conference for day 2 here. I'm Mike Cyprys, equity analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges, for Morgan Stanley Research. And for our next session, I'm thrilled here to welcome here, Scott Hart, CEO of StepStone and Mike McCabe, Head of Strategy. StepStone is a global private markets firm, providing customized investment solutions and advisory data services to clients around the globe. StepStone oversees about $520 billion of private market allocations. Including about $157 billion of assets under management. Scott, Mike, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Thanks for having us.

Great. So let's start big picture a little bit of sort of an overview here. StepStone's role in the private markets. Why don't we start with that? As a solution provider, you're a little bit different than the GPs that most are familiar with. You help provide asset owners with access to the private markets. Maybe talk about your value proposition a bit, how it differs from the GPs and the types of customers that are coming to StepStone today?

Sure. I know you're right. I mean, we're a bit different in some of the GPs that you may all be familiar with. In fact, those are groups we tend to partner with either by investing in their funds or co-investing directly alongside of them into companies. But where we sit within the broader private market ecosystem is between our clients who tend to be sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurance companies, endowments and foundations and increasingly, family offices or the individual investor, but between them and these GPs are managers that you're referencing. And what I think many of the LPs or asset owners that we work with have in common is, yes, they're trying to build exposure to the private markets. Many of them tend to have relatively small teams that are being asked to cover an increasingly global and an increasingly complex private markets landscape where a lot of the growth that we've seen in the underlying managers or a number of strategies have happened in pretty specialized areas of the market. And so therefore, partnering with a group like StepStone is an efficient way to access the private markets because while that's what they have in common, they're trying to access the private markets. One of the key observations that we made early on was that no 2 LPs or no 2 LP types were exactly like and therefore, being able to provide them with a solution either in the form of a customized separate account that's designed to meet their specific needs or a product that we designed specifically to meet the needs of that broader category of investor that is actually a very interesting place for us to be. Now to be a solution provider, I always talk about there's 3 things that you really need to have or need to do. One, is to have a listen first mentality so we understand the challenges our clients face and can help address those needs. Two, you've got to have a comprehensive platform that allows you to solve a number of different challenges. In our case, that platform consists of 4 different asset classes across the private markets, private equity, infrastructure, real estate and private credit and really consists of 3 main strategies for investing in those asset classes primary fund investments, secondaries and co-investments. But then the third element of being a solutions provider is really having the willingness or the ability and the ability to work with our clients in whatever way they best see fit. And so in our case, that is through separate accounts, which continue to be the largest part of our business on an AUM basis, commingled funds, a growing suite of evergreen products that we've designed specifically for the private wealth space. as well as advisory or data solutions. And so that's really what we think about when we talk about being a solutions provider.

Great. Why don't we talk a little bit about growth algorithm and the latest fiscal year, you guys generated over 20% growth in fee-related earnings. With 100 basis points of margin expansion. How should we think about your growth algorithm as we look forward? And what level of growth do you view as sustainable?

Great. Thanks, Mike. So it was about this time last year that we had our debut Investor Day. And it was during that Investor Day that we set forth to target that we believe we could at least double our FRE over the next 5 years. And bring our FRE margins up into the mid-30s. And so when we look back on the last 12 months, having generated more -- north of 20% FRE growth and 100 basis points of margin expansion. What we feel we're off to a fantastic start as far as that target was concerned. But maybe I'll take a minute to revisit the growth drivers that we presented during that Investor Day, which broke down into basically 4 areas. The first is, as Scott mentioned, we have a very large managed account business. And so a source of our growth going forward will continue to be managed accounts, whether it's re-upping with existing clients, whether it's adding new clients, whether it's expanding client mandates into new strategies and asset classes is certainly a large source of our growth going forward. Adding new clients is an everyday activity that we have a large business development team out on the road around the world developing new client relationships. The third leg to the stool is our commingled fund business. We have a large suite of commingled funds that are modest in size between $1 billion and $3 billion. And so that gives a lot of room for us to scale up those commingled funds. And then fourth, last but not least, I'm sure this is something you'll spend a little time on, Mike. And that is our wealth management platform is off to a very strong start. And so those are the 4 drivers. And then when we overlay those 4 drivers like a chessboard around the world, we have offices in 27 cities in 16 countries. And so those commercial models, whether it's a managed account, commingled fund or evergreen are being marketed around the world. And importantly, roughly 2/3 of our revenue is coming from outside of North America. So A big part of our growth engine is our geographic diversification. And then last but not least, as Scott mentioned, private equity and venture capital, are certainly half our business. But the other half of our business, our fast-growing asset classes like credit infrastructure and real estate.

Great. And you mentioned new customers. You mentioned re-ups amongst existing. Maybe we could just unpack that a little bit more. Just how do you sort of see the mix of new customers coming to the firm. Maybe if you can kind of give us any sort of stats you're able to share kind of what the pace is? How that's evolved? And when you look at the existing customer set, what sort of gross and net retention are you seeing?

Sure. And this gets a lot back to the culture that Scott had mentioned about a listen first culture where we're really paying attention to what our clients' needs are. And for that reason, we've enjoyed a 90% re-up rate with existing clients and those mandates they have with us. And when they do re-up with us, we've enjoyed roughly a 30% increase in size with each re-up. So I guess you could do the math there and translate to roughly 120% net retention rate with existing clients and existing mandates. Now when we look back over the last 12 months, we saw $18 billion of gross AUM inflows. And when we unpack where those flows came from, roughly 1/4 of those flows came from existing clients that decided to expand that relationship with StepStone into other strategies or into other asset classes. And then another 1/4 of that $18 billion came from establishing new client relationships. So we really enjoy the benefit of both expanding with existing clients as well as adding new products.

That's great. Maybe digging a little more on fundraising, Shifting over to the past 18 months we heard about a tough fundraising backdrop from many across the industry, including yourselves, but it seems like it's maybe starting to improve a little bit. So how are you seeing the fundraising environment today? And how are your campaigns progressing?

Yes. Look, it's certainly been a tough fundraising environment over the last 12, 18 months as you found yourself in a situation where many limited partners were over-allocated relative to their target allocations. But I want to distinguish between this sort of this temporary issue of being over-allocated relative to one's target with the longer-term trend, which I think continues to be that most of the institutions that we're speaking with are maintaining or increasing their long-term targets to the asset class. And so this temporary issue being over-allocated has started to be alleviated as we've seen the public markets recover. We still need to see distributions pick up before -- we see all LPs being more active in today's market. But certainly, as we turn the corner into calendar 2024, and as we and other colleagues at StepStone spent time traveling around the world, particularly in markets like Asia, like the Middle East, but also equally parts of the U.S. and Europe as well, you certainly got the sense that things were starting to happen. And what we've been talking about over the last several quarters is we felt like we were laying the groundwork for -- a very strong year ahead, and we were proud to see some of those results start to come through this most recent quarter, whether on some of our commingled funds where, for example, we've just wrapped up the fundraising for our venture capital secondaries fund at $3.3 billion, which is the largest venture secondaries fund in the market. and have a number of other strategies that are continuing to progress towards their goals. And so the way I would characterize the market I made this comment during our last earnings call is, look, it's one where I would not describe it as universally strong but really bifurcated between the haves and the have-nots. And if you have a strategy that is in demand today, if you have supportive LPs amongst your client base, and if you have a track record that has held up over time, you can certainly get a successful fund raise done. And we feel fortunate because of the diversified nature of our platform, we certainly have a number of asset classes and strategies like secondaries, which we spent a lot of time talking about over the last few years, that are very much in demand today.

So have, have-nots fundraising backdrop improving a little bit, I guess, gives you a bit of confidence as you think about bringing more fund strategies to the marketplace.

Correct. correct .

Okay. Cross-sell. I want to dig in there a little bit. If we look at your mix of your business today, about half of it is in private equity, the other half is outside of private equity, right? So real estate, infrastructure, and credit. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about how cross-selling is progressing across your customer set and what sort of traction you're seeing, particularly if you look at some of your best customers. Yes.

Yes. Well, I mean you heard the stat that Mike mentioned, right? Which is that roughly 1/4 of the gross AUM flows over the last 12 months have been from expansion of existing client relations that is essentially cross-selling into additional asset classes into additional strategies outside of the ones that they've been invested in historically. And so we feel like we're certainly making progress there. The other statistic that we have often mentioned is that roughly 35% of our clients tend to have a relationship with us across more than one asset class. But I think in a way that 35%, which is based on the number of clients, probably underestimates how powerful this ability to expand client relationships has been. And as for the point you mentioned, which is how has that gone with some of our largest and our most important clients. We, again, at the Investor Day, Mike referenced about a year ago, laid out a number of different case studies across some of those clients that looked at the life cycle of a relationship and how it has expanded over time with some of our largest clients. And frankly, the reason they are our largest clients today is because they have grown with us over time. And we've, in some cases, even built the business around the feedback that we were getting from the those clients in the early days at StepStone. I can vividly remember conversations with clients saying, "Look, StepStone, we love what you've done for us in private equity", back in the 2011-2012 time period saying, "we're looking for similar solutions in real estate or infrastructure and private credit." As we built out those capabilities and as more recently as we acquired Greenspring expanded our venture capital capabilities, we've been proud to see that those clients have grown with us, have expanded with us. And frankly, I think the Greenspring example is another good one. I mean Greenspring intentive to be more focused on offering commingled fund solutions by joining forces. We not only created the market leader amongst venture and growth solutions providers, but the synergy potential and the synergies we're executing on, whether that's offering separate accounts, which was not something they really did historically or the ability to launch a product like spring, our private wealth product and the venture and growth space were great examples of the benefits of coming together with a group like Greenspring.

And have you started to offer some SMAs on the Greenspring part of the business?

We have. We've had good success, including with existing StepStone clients, or frankly, with groups that we have been trying over the last 10 years to build a relationship with. And once we have this capability turned out to be the foot in the door and the way to establish relation with a large asset owner.

You mentioned retail number of times. So why don't we dive in there. Your private wealth channel is a growing focus for many investors here for StepStone, you've launched 4 products, including, I think, the credit product that we just launched late last week. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how these products differ. You have 4 of them. What's the uptake has been and what the feedback has been from clients?

Sure. Thanks, Mike. Yes. But we were excited to launch our debut private credit product called CRDEX into the retail channels last week. And so we're very excited about that. You're right. That brings us to 4 evergreen products and those 4 products really started in 2020, November of 2020, which was SPRIM, which was intended to be a broad, highly diversified private and markets product solution down to the accredited investor. The second product that we launched about 2 years later in October of 2022, it was called spring, paying homage to the acquisition of Greenspring, and this was StepStone offering into the retail space for the first and only multi-manager venture capital and growth equity product. And that was tailored toward the qualified client and above. And then about a year later, in September of 2023. We offered a unique product called Structure, which is, again, the only multi-manager product available for the evergreen -- in the evergreen space for the retail investor in infrastructure, and that was our first interval fund. And we'll talk a bit more about that. And then our fourth product, of course, which we launched just last week. Again, another interval fund is our private credit product. Now how they are similar is all 4 products are multi-manager products. So investors are getting the diversification of a broad range of managers without having to try to figure out which manager should I choose? The second thing that all funds have in common is that they're 1099 tax reporting. So there are no inefficiencies associated with the K-1s. And the last but not least, these are all invested capital on day one. They're not capital calls that are drawn down over a period of time, so they're very capital efficient. Now where they differ is SPRIM is unique in that it is available down to the accredited investor. It has a ticker associated with it, which we generated about 1.5 years ago that relates to a daily valuation engine, which allows us to create a daily mark for SPRIM investors each day, and that allows the FAs to buy on any given day of the month as opposed to waiting until the end of the month to buy one. So it provides an ease of use to the FAs and it provides a daily mark for investors. Spring is unique in that, again, as I mentioned, it is the only evergreen product that's available across multi-managers in the venture capital space. And as I mentioned, that is available to the qualified client and above. Structure was our first interval fund. Again, that's available for FAs to invest in on any given day of the month, that is a daily mark and a daily ticker, and that has the benefit of both a yield component being an infrastructure asset as well as capital appreciation. And then last but not least, our second interval fund is of CRDEX. And CRDEX, again, is a multi-manager credit product that is available getting down to the accredited investor with a daily entry through its ticker. The uptake and the adoption rate for all of these products have been very exciting. SPRIM had a great adoption curve coming out of the gate. But what we've seen is with spring and with structure are the adoption curves for those 2 products have met or exceeded the adoption curve of spring, and we're certainly optimistic about how CRDEX will enjoy a similar adoption curve.

So it sounds like 3 or 4 are accredited. Is that right?

That's right.

And Greenspring is the only qualified. So that's for $5 million and above.

That's exactly right.

That's where is the others are maybe down [ $1 million ] depending upon the platforms.

Or even less so.

Or even less. Okay. Fantastic. And maybe just with the credit fund, just given it's new, maybe you could just help us unpack a little bit around how that product is going to invest? What's sort of the strategy? What sort of returns? Just anything you're able to share on that product to the extent you're able to talk about that?

No, sure. The CRDEX product really follows the private credit strategy that our team has been deploying for close to 20 years now. Now they joined the StepStone platform in 2018. But the intent here is to invest in senior secured direct lending pieces of paper alongside a variety of managers in the market. So it's not a manager specific, it's a multi-manager product. But again, it's largely senior secured direct lending. That will be roughly 3/4 of the fund, maybe a bit more as high as 80%. And the balance would be a bit more opportunistic credit, that could be in different strategies, whether it's leasing or other kinds of strategies along those lines. So it's a combination of direct lending and opportunistic credit. And I would say they're largely co-investing alongside managers as well as some secondary investments from potential sellers.

You went with the interval fund, we're seeing some others go with BDCs in the marketplace. Is that something that you guys might have interest in as well at some point down the road? Just curious how you think about why go the interval fund route versus the nontraded BDC that we've seen others go?

Well, we have both. We have a BDC called SCRED.

Oh, that was the early one.

That was the early one, exactly.

And just how do you think about the difference between...

Well the SCRED is a bit more, I think -- it's more for the institutional investors that are seeing SCRED as a way to enter the market. And I think European institutional investors also are looking for the SCRED BDC. The interval fund is going to be a bit more U.S.-centric investors, we believe. A bit more retail oriented.

Maybe we could talk about the distribution strategy that you guys have in place around the private wealth channel, the resources you're putting behind it. Maybe you could just elaborate a bit on that and how you're expanding the distribution of the 4 products on the channel?

Yes. I think like so many of the growth initiatives that we've pursued over the years of steps, and it really kind of started with the team. And so Mike mentioned the launch, you have SPRIM in 2020, but even prior to that had started to build out a private wealth team led by senior professionals -- have really built their careers in this part of the market. That team today, to your question around the resources we're putting behind it is now a 70-person team. With roughly 40 professionals focused on the sales side of things here. But you've often heard our colleague, Jason Ment, talk about there really being 4 key stools to -- or legs to the distribution strategy, starting with RIAs, the IBDs, the wires and then there's international leg to the growth as well. And we sort of pursue the different channels in that order, starting with the RIA channel related to who were some of the first movers and allowed us to start to build up critical mass to the point where these funds would be large enough to then take to the wires given some of the concentration limits that you'd otherwise be concerned about, whether it's the percentage of the monthly flows or the percentage of the overall vehicle that might be coming from an individual wire. And so fast forward a few years, having launched in November 2020, we're now on over 300 distinct platforms across these 4 products that Mike described for SPRIM, we're now on 2 wires. Spring is on one and that the SCRED's product not yet on a wire. But it's been interesting to kind of watch the development from SPRIM to spring to SCRED's and now the launch of CRDEX. Look, I think we're certainly benefiting from the fact that we've been out there educating the market, not only on these products, but on StepStone, which was not necessarily a brand previously, it was familiar in these channels. And so you're seeing that the uptake with each new fund launch had improved from a timing standpoint to both spring and SCRED's are at above the point that SPRIM was at the same point in its development. And when you -- even when you look at the overlap amongst the platforms, you would look and see that spring is on roughly half of the same platforms that SPRIM is on and SCRED it's sort of a similar trend behind spring the Venture products. So making good progress, but it's a lot of blocking tackle. It's a lot of education in this part of the market, but have a large team that is dedicated to the success of these products.

So 4 products, they're growing. How do you think about the risk of too much success too soon? When you think about flows coming in, in the retail channel, some firms over the years have maybe had to turn off the retail channel because they were getting too much and they couldn't deploy it. So how do you think about that sort of risk? Is that a risk that you guys [ are willing to take ]?

Look, I think it's something that needs to be monitored and managed. I think it's important to put into context the fact that we are a bit over $3 billion of AUM in the private wealth channel versus over $150 billion at StepStone overall. So I think we're in the early innings of the growth in this part of the market here, but certainly proud of and excited about the growth that we have achieved. And so I think like other parts of our business, we need to be constantly focused on, can we successfully invest the capital that we are raising? So that's something that we continue to be quite focused on whether we're talking about institutional products or for the retail channel. And I think in a lot of ways, if we're starting to have to have those conversations, it's a bit of a high-class problem to have, but certainly I think we're in the early innings of the development here at StepStone.

Fair enough. One of the benefits, though, of the growth in these retail strategies is the new incentive fee revenue stream. That could come over time from this. Maybe talk about the economics of how that works, what's your approach to revenue recognition? And how meaningful could these incentive fees be over time? Yes.

Look, we think they can be meaningful. But again, it's probably early days for us, particularly because SPRIM, the largest product, which as Mike described, is offered down to the accredited investor level does not charge incentive fees. It charges mana fee on net asset value, but does not charge incentive fees. Spring and now the new CRDEX product will have the ability to charge incentive fees. And so for example, you saw during our fiscal third quarter last year that the CRDEX -- the incentive fees for spring were crystallized at about $9 million. And so those will be crystallized on an annual basis in that fiscal third quarter. The CRDEX product will have both a quarterly and an annual element to how incentive fees are crystallized. But again, very early innings as we're just launching that vehicle in terms of how meaningful those could become over time.

And those are like 12.5%, 15% incentive fees roughly over some sort of prep?

That's right.

Maybe shifting over to secondaries activity overall, equity markets reaching new highs this year. Just how are you seeing the sort of market backdrop for secondary deal activity here?

I mean the secondary market has certainly been a front-end center part of the market in the last couple of years. And maybe setting some context to how the secondary market works. Before talking about where we are in terms of the market environment, the secondary market has been growing since the late 1990s and early 2000s. And really, what buyers and sellers in the secondary market are doing are different things. From a seller's perspective, there used to be a bit of a stigmatization of why someone is selling out of a contractually committed partnership agreement. And the reality is sellers either are looking for cash for liquidity needs to fund other purposes. But more recently, we're seeing sellers looking to balance their portfolio and using the secondary market by selling interest that are either reducing exposures to certain strategies, geographies, we're laying off unfunded liabilities. The secondary market has now become a use -- an actively managed portfolio tool that sellers are using on a regular basis. And the volumes of LPs selling are in the $50 billion to $60 billion a year in any given year, and that's been growing as the overall industry has been growing. Now from a buyer's perspective, buyers are using the secondary market to do a number of things. The first is they're using the secondary market to get ahead of the J curve, so they're buying year, 3, 4, 5 into the life of the fund. So it's a mature portfolio. There's a lack of a blind pool and these are performing assets. And so there isn't this J curve that occurs one and LP comes into a fund on day one. They're also using to diversify their portfolio by buying older vintages. So it's a fairly new investor into the asset class that may not want all 2024 exposure, they'll go into the secondary market and buy 2016 exposure, or 2015 exposure. So the buyers have a desire to diversify their portfolio by buying into the secondary market. So the motivations between the buyers and the sellers are really about portfolio management and portfolio construction, but less about this perception that there's a seller that is struggling and as a distressed situation has to get out and raise cash. We certainly saw that in 2001. We saw it again in 2010, and we saw a little bit of that during the COVID era, but that's quite episodic. In between those episodic stressful moments, there is this continual buying and selling of interest in the market. And then more recently, over the last couple of years, as exit opportunities for GPs have stalled out either through the IPO window closing or whether interest rates coming up and transaction volumes coming down. GPs have been thinking about how do we generate liquidity for our LPs? And in some cases, they don't want to sell a particular asset because it's been that gift that keeps on giving. And they're like, "Wow, I want to hold on to this, but it's in year 5 or 6." The secondary market has come up with a very creative solution for GPs to create these continuation vehicles. And so the combination of these continuation vehicles and LPs buying and selling has created a secondary market that is now in its fourth year of over $100 billion a year in volume. And you can see through Scott's comments earlier, StepStone is in the market with 4 secondary funds, our private equity secondary fund has $3.3 billion of closings, which is 50% greater than the prior vintage. Our venture capital secondaries fund has closed on $3.3 billion, which is the largest secondary fund of its kind in the market, up from $2.6 billion of its prior vintage, and we're also in the market with a real estate secondaries fund. Which is an opportune strategy to have at this point in the cycle. And last but not least, we have an infrastructure secondaries fund as well. So all the asset classes are participating in the secondary market one way or another.

Maybe we could dive in a little bit more on deployment here. Just as you kind of look across your platform, activity picked up in the March quarter for you guys. Talk about where you're most active today in terms of deployment -- and just given some of the liquidity challenges you were alluding to that LPs are facing, might we see a meaningful pickup in deployment activity on the secondaries as we look out of the next 12 months? How do you see that playing out?

Yes, I certainly think that I mean secondaries has been active and will continue to be active for us from a deployment standpoint over the last -- several years has probably been the most consistent part of the business from a deployment standpoint given some trends that Mike just touched on. Where I'd also spend some time talking about is on the co-investment side, which is certainly one of the parts of the business where we get a good real-time sense for what's going on in the market, transactions that are getting done, not getting done etc. And after what was a fairly slow 2023, we did start to see things pick up in the second half, and that has continued into early 2024 here on the co-investment side. And what I would say is that the big change -- the change that we've started to see is that the quality of the opportunities has now started to improve. And frankly, the size of some of the opportunities has started to improve which is important when you're thinking about these co-investment opportunities. If you looked at the transactions that we did complete in 2023 and compared them from a size standpoint, to the deals we've done over the prior 5 years, they're roughly half the size of our average ticket that is now rebounded or started to rebound during the first part of this year towards our longer-term averages, which I think there were just so many managers that shifted towards small and mid-market transactions, which were the ones that could get done given the state of the credit markets at the time. So I think an improvement in both the size and the quality of the opportunities that we're seeing in the first half of 2024. And again, to our conversion around thinking about how we can deploy the capital we've raised over time, we today have about $20 billion of what we call undeployed fee-earning capital, it's a bit more than that when we reported last quarter, but with the activation of our venture secondary funds, about $20 billion that needs to be deployed. We often talk about deploying that over a 3- to 5-year time period. And if you look at the average quarterly commitment pace that we've been on over the last year, that would imply something just under 4 years that will take us to deploy that capital, even at the slightly reduced levels relative to longer-term activity levels.

Great. Maybe shifting gears to more strategic activity. Earlier this year, you guys announced an agreement to buy in the non-private equity business, which you had a large minority of 49 percentage or so ownership stake you're planning to buy in over the next 10 years. So just talk about how this is structured, what sort of accretion can we expect over time?

Great. Thanks. So for those of you who are less familiar with StepStone's history, we started out as a private equity-centric firm. But about 10 years ago, we decided to diversify the platform into infrastructure, real estate and private credit. And the way we did that was really by really capturing that entrepreneurial spirit and culture that has driven our success by creating these 50-50 equity ownerships in these businesses with large senior experienced teams that we acquired and brought on to the platform. Now it's important to note that this was really intended to be a compensation structure, not an affiliate model. And so there was always the intention and the idea to buy in that 50% equity that we had shared with these teams on day one. Earlier this year, Mike, you're right. We announced 10 years, after we made that decision and having lived with these teams for almost a decade to begin the process of buying in those interests. And so we established and we announced an agreement with each of the asset class teams to prewire, a hardwired buy-in of the NCI, the noncontrolling interests at 10% increments each year for the next 10 years. That way, it gives them plenty of time to continue to grow and enjoy the compensation center structure that we established on day one. And we also created the option to be mutually agreed, should they decide to accelerate that buy-in at year 5. And the way that the transactions work each year is we'll issuing equity in exchange for equity to maintain that alignment of interest. So Step equity for the subsidiary equity with a little bit of cash. And the valuation at which that equity exchange occurs will be at a discount to StepStones trading multiple. And the way it works is we created sort of a 16x multiple as a floor, if you will, of StepStone stock, which translates to a 9% discount of the interest that we're buying in. As our multiple goes up, so we're in the 20s now, the discount will be greater. So you can see this relationship between discount and multiple, which means every time we do an exchange, the exchange will happen on an accretive basis. Now how accretive it will be in any given year will be in dollar terms, pretty small because it's only 10%. But when you look out 10 years, the cumulative and compounding effect of buying in those interests that are growing at or above the private equity and venture capital business, it really -- we expect it to be quite accretive. Without -- and yes, the way to think about it, it's a really nice embedded M&A model within the StepStone platform without the integration risk, having lived with these teams now for a decade.

0 Great. And I'm afraid we're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate your time.

You're welcome Mike.

Thanks Mike.