The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning.

Thanks for coming, David. Really appreciate it.

Delighted to be here, isn't this better than being in New York at the end of February?

Without a doubt. Absolutely. And I know it's something that you've made a regular appearance with. So we're really happy to see you here with us after the transition from the long heritage that Credit Suisse had over to UBS.

Delighted to be here.

The man needs no introduction, but David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs. And of course, I'm Brennan Hawken, Capital Markets Analyst here at UBS. I'd like to jump right in, if that's okay, David.

Sure. Absolutely.

So you've been now CEO for about 5 years. Interested in maybe taking a step back and reflecting on your experience, what are some of the big accomplishments, maybe some of the big challenges, and what you've learned from that?

Sure. Well, it's been 5.5 years, and it's certainly been an interesting 5.5 years. And I'd say the -- there's always in these jobs and running companies and platforms like this, there are always challenges. There are always headwinds and tailwinds, and they ebb and flow. I think the pandemic was a real outlier event that was hard to anticipate. And I think we all learned and had kind of disruptions of extremes from the experience of pandemic that are different than what anybody would expect. But if you put that aside, I kind of look at the body of work that the broad leadership team has accomplished over the course of the last 5.5 years and we feel very, very good about it. It hasn't been a straight line. But we set out to really think about how we could set the firm up to grow, expand our franchise and be positioned very well to provide solid returns for shareholders on both an absolute and a relative basis. And I look at what we've done over that period of time, and I think we've made a lot of progress. If you go back to our first Investor Day in 2020, we said that we were going to invest in our core business of banking and markets because we thought there were opportunities to strengthen the client franchise to take share and to grow. And we had four other places that we were going to focus. We were going to focus on asset management, we were going to focus on wealth management, we were going to focus on transaction banking, and we were going to focus on consumer businesses. And we are also going to work to run the firm more efficiently. And if you look over the course of the last four years, we've done some real work on the cost structure of the firm that I think has paid real benefits. Now along the way, we significantly increased our wallet share over 350 basis points in banking and markets. We grew that franchise. We've grown our ability to finance our clients very significantly. We've compounded the financing revenues in our FICC and Equities business associated with financing our clients by 15% compounded since 2019, which has obviously put more durable revenue into that business. And I look at our banking and markets franchise, I think we're the clear leader broadly in that business. And I think we've got more room to continue to take share and strengthen that franchise. I think we also, through our One GS operating ethos, materially strengthened the nature of our client relationships and the way clients see us, which I think has also helped. We made a lot of progress in Asset Management and Wealth Management. We've made progress on Transaction Banking. We decided -- and this was, I think, a decision that we feel very good about -- that the journey we're on in Consumer was not working the way we thought it would and that the world had changed, and so we made an aggressive decision to narrow that materially. We've made a lot of progress on that over the course of the last couple of years. So the firm is now set up with two great businesses that we have a right to win in, we're winning or we have a right to win even more in, through banking and markets and asset and wealth management. And I think the firm is positioned incredibly well. And if you look at the performance over that time, when I look ahead for the next 3 to 5 years, I feel great about the way the firm is positioned, I feel great about our client franchise, and I think we're going to continue to deliver good returns for shareholders and grow the franchise. And so I feel good about it. Now it's not been a perfect journey, but there is no perfect journey when you're dealing in the real world. And so I think we're in a very good place, and I feel very good about it.

That's good. That's great. The outlook, when you think about the macro environment, it's been a lot more resilient than expected. To be honest, the -- I feel like in this macro environment, it's been really hard to like track the baseball, right? I can't understand exactly what's happening. What's your perspective on the macro environment, and how does that impact the way that you're operating the firm?

Yes, well I think the thing that we got wrong in terms of the resiliency is, we all appreciated the amount of fiscal stimulus, but it's kind of hard to really understand if you spend $6 trillion to $7 trillion kind of the lingering impact that has on money in the system, and it's had a big, big impact. I'd say that overall, I mean, the world is set up for a soft landing. The market certainly perceives there's a very, very high delta to a soft landing. My own view is it's a little bit more uncertain than that, and you would have to expect that, given the extreme disruption associated with the pandemic and the normalization. My own observations would be the service economy is still very strong. The upper half of the economy here in the United States is still very strong. The lower tier of the economy, I think consumer behaviors are softening a little bit. It's interesting, when you listen to the political narrative, there's a lot of talk about core inflation. But at the end of the day, what do Americans care about? Their gas, their food and their housing. And while the velocity of inflation has certainly slowed, prices are materially higher than they were four years ago. And so if you're an average American, you're asking the question, what's my purchasing power feel like today versus four years ago? That purchasing power feels more strained. And I've talked to a bunch of CEOs that operate businesses that would have good insight into what I'll call more paycheck-to-paycheck kind of spending behaviors. I think that in the last few months, you see a pattern of those behaviors tightening up, which means that lower part of the economy is a little bit softer. I think the world is more fragile. We have three geopolitical kind of hotspots at the moment. That has to be a headwind to global growth. That has to put some inflationary pressure into the overall ecosystem. So I just think we're operating pretty well, but just with a higher level of uncertainty that the market is pricing in. You've seen -- I did not understand earlier this month, in fact, when I was on TV -- it's hard to imagine it was just a month ago -- when I was on TV in Davos a month ago, the consensus was for 7 interest rate cuts, and I said, I just don't understand this. So now we're down to 4 as kind of a consensus move. And so we keep pushing that out. And so I just think a little slower, a little stickier, a little more sluggish. But no, we could have a recession, we might not. I'm not going to 50-50 or 70-30 or 30-70, I'm not smart enough, but the market is way weighted to a very soft landing. And when you look at the pattern of facts for the last 3 or 4 years, it's hard for me to see it's going to be that simple.

Sure. That's fair. And we all use the forward curve as an input, but it feels like the forward curve has been wrong.

Well, the forward curve can change too, very quickly. Absolutely.

Of course. So given that perspective and your view, what's your view on the opportunity set for your largest businesses, FICC, equities, [ investment banking ]?

Yes, I think you have to be very careful. And it's just -- it's very interesting to me. People live in this -- people live in a lens of kind of looking through the rearview mirror. And so even though it's been 15 years since the financial crisis, it's kind of -- there's this view of kind of looking at that, because that was a significant speed bump, but assuming that if you have any kind of an economic slowdown or something like that, you go through a real financial turbulence, the economy could just slow down. Investors will keep repositioning in a slower economy. By the way, investors are repositioning a bunch right now because two minutes ago it was 7 interest rate cuts, now it's 4 interest rate cuts. So the velocity of activity is still pretty good. The place where the velocity of activity has been slow, has been in Investment Banking. But I'd just highlight, if a you're student of this over 25 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, you don't really get extended periods with anemic investment banking activity, because at the end of the day people have to accept values in the market, financing costs, they have to run their business, they have to raise capital. And so we really, in the second half of '22 and the first half of '23, ran at super, super anemic investment banking activity. It's gotten better, but it's not back to kind of 10-year averages. And I don't see any reason why the expectation over the next three years shouldn't look more like 10-year averages, not saying that it should look like top quartile.

[indiscernible].

Yes, just 10-year averages. And at 10-year averages, there's a lot of upside for us in our business. And so I think we're probably more correlated to that than any other firm. So I think we're going to see a better operating environment for our core business. That doesn't mean every quarter, every minute, but I think we've seen it already from kind of the lows in the first half of '23. And my expectation is that those businesses will look more normal, and we have billions of dollars of upside in the normalization of those businesses.

Sure. And is that mostly on investment banking? Or is that also in the equities and the FICC side too?

Well, the equities and FICC side have run pretty well. We continue to grow those businesses through our financing activity, we've seen more upside in that. Intermediation can be more volatile, but the world is very dynamic. And one of the things I'd just highlight is intermediation activities aren't going away, and the bigger players have secured a stronger position in those businesses and have the capability to serve clients. And so I think that you can look at kind of performance in those businesses, and you'll see ups and downs. But I think the performance of those businesses over the last few years is a reasonable range of base for us.

Is the uncertainty that's in the market as we talked about, we said the forward curve, right, initially cutting -- putting a bunch of cuts, now less, I mean, that's got to help the intermediation business a little bit, right?

You see, when things change, when the view changes, you see more intermediation activity, and FICC is interesting, because FICC has -- FICC does have some countercyclicality to it. When times get really tough, FICC does have some countercyclicality to it. But look, these are big, big businesses. They are very, very diverse in their inputs. One year you might have more commodities activity, one year you might have more interest rate activity, one year you've got more structured finance and mortgage activity, but they balance out. And when you look at them, I mean -- this is one of the things we tried to put forward in our earnings discussion at the end of the first quarter, it's not like these businesses start at 0 every year, okay, and we're wondering whether the lights are going to come on. There's a base of activity in these businesses every single year. And then our job is, when it's available, to make sure we capture on a relative basis more of the share of that activity. We've got a very good track record of doing that pretty consistently.

Yes. And that is a perfect segue into the -- this durable [ revenues ] that you guys put out here. I'd love to drill down on that and -- because that caught a lot of attention and investors are wondering how to think about that. Can you elaborate or maybe give a little more color around how you guys define the durable revenues?

Sure. Sure. And look, it's one of the things we've been talking to investors about and trying to take feedback on how we can communicate. We think we've increased the durability of our revenue business -- of the revenues in our business, and we've strengthened our earnings. And I think there's -- the lens on the consistency of our ability to generate profits in our businesses, we've still got to do a better job kind of finding ways to explain it. So we took a stab at it this last quarter and we started with first our durable revenues. We have grown our durable revenues, which is management fees and financing fees, which everybody would agree are durable, and I think are now up to kind of mid-40s, I'm going to say off the top of my head, the number I remember was 43%, so don't hold me to that exactly -- where is Carey? 43%? Is that right?

Those two together?

Yes, the two together. No. The more durable, management fees, financing fees, et cetera, $20 billion. $20 billion, 43%, okay? I mean I can't remember all the numbers, I remember some, $20 billion. When you look at that, we've grown that. We've compounded that at 13% since 2019, growing our management fees and our financing activity. We've compounded that by 13% since 2019. Everybody looks at that and says, okay, we get that. That's a big chunk, $20 billion. The next thing we said is, okay, we have these things that people consider as more volatile, like intermediation activity, capital markets activity, M&A revenues, but they don't start at 0 every year. What's a way that we can present the base to people? [ We said ] let's look at the low for each one of those activities for the last 10 years. And let's assume that every one of those activities in the same year was at their 10-year low -- which by the way has never happened since we have been a public company, and the chance of that happening, I think, is very, very low. But if you take that, okay, and you look at that, that adds another $14 billion of revenue. It takes us up to $34 billion of revenue. And so that's close to 70% of our base revenue. And so when you look at that and you move forward, then what's the balance? Well, the balance every year is it's not the 10-year low. There's more M&A fees or there's more capital markets activity, there's more intermediation, and that can vary. And we're very, very good at working with our clients, having leading share in capturing what's out there. And so we're very focused on continuing to grow management fees, continuing to grow the financing activity. The market will tee up for us what's available in capital markets activity, et cetera. But these are big businesses that don't start at 0 every year. There's a real base. And so people appreciated that, and thought that, that was a good way to kind of look at a significant portion, 2/3 of the revenues of the firm, and say, this is a real solid base to build off of.

Sure. And the financing revenues is something that you guys break out sort of uniquely, so I'd love to hear from your perspective, the equities and the FICC financing revenues, what are the drivers of that, and maybe just share...

The drivers of it are growth in the world. And when you think about many of you in this room as clients, okay, you have to finance your activities. And when you think about how many firms are out there that can truly finance what you want to do, there aren't a lot that have the scale and the capability to truly finance. You look at the Prime business. Prime is not a business. People talk about getting involved in credit intermediation or this and that, Prime is not a business that you can just have a multi-strat platform where somebody says, "Hey, let's get involved in the Prime business." There are only a handful of firms that on a global basis can truly provide that service to the big institutional community. And so I think that scale players have an enormous advantage in these activities. And I think we're well positioned to continue, for important clients, to drive our capability to finance them. And it's just not something that the firm had focused on. I mean you have to remember, we weren't a bank. We really weren't a bank, and we're now a bank. We're a different bank than other banks. I think we've got real differentiating factors in terms of who we are, but banks should lend money, and what better place for us to lend money and generate NIM than financing our clients and market activity where we think we have as good an understanding of that activity than anybody in the world.

Sure. No, I know my model goes back to when the November year-end was the reality.

I remember that November year-end. I wish we had kept it. I mean it was awfully nice to go home for Christmas with everything done, packed, and over, as opposed to be kind of working through Christmas on all those wonderful things we all do at the end of the year.

Sure, of course. The Prime, I think most people recognize Goldman is absolutely a leader in PB. The FICC equity -- the FICC financing is one thing that I thought was interesting, and in the breakout sessions at your Investor Day, I attended that, I was surprised to learn that actually, some of the drivers are a lot of the secular trends that we talk about within private credit, all of that.

All of that has to be financed.

Right.

Okay. Now we're a big private credit player too. I mean we talked about that too, $130 billion of private credit assets. But all that has to be financed, okay? And there are different ways to finance it, and we're just very well positioned to catch tailwind on that secular growth.

Right. Yes. No. To me, I think that's underappreciated. So thanks for touching on that. You have been committed to the through-the-cycle mid-teens returns. So could you unpack some of the drivers about what's going to get you there? That actually got a lot of attention coming out of the fourth quarter.

Yes. I think we've really simplified. I think one of the things -- we went on this journey, we laid out a plan. We had some growth areas, but I think we've really simplified where we are. And we have two big core businesses, one where we're a clear leader, the business has obviously performed very, very well on both an absolute and a relative basis over a long period of time and that's Global Banking & Markets. We've now got it set up in a way where we can disclose it to you so that you can really understand it and compare it to other people's businesses. And look, we really believe that, that business, which is a significant portion of the firm, is a mid-teens business through the cycle. And I don't think you have to look much further than the fact that last year was nowhere near kind of a midrange performance for that business and it still returned over 12%. And so through the cycle, we think it's a mid-teens business. We're committed to that. We believe we can deliver on that. And we think in the coming years, we'll give more data for that. But obviously, when investment banking is running at anemic 10-year lows, you're not going to see the average through the cycle performance for that business. And then on the Asset Management business, we have a clear path to higher margins and mid-teens returns in that business. We said clearly that's not aspirational for that business. And so if you think about for the next 5, 7 years through the rest of the decade, our ability to continue to make progress broadly on that business, that's the firm. That's the firm. And we've got a little bit more work to do in the narrowing of the Consumer, but that's the firm. And so we have two big businesses that we're pretty confident we can deliver mid-teens returns. That makes the firm mid-teens. It's -- the math's not that complicated, even for guys like us.

Even for a guy like me. Yes, I know. I hear you. The GBM, the results, I think that -- very, very clear, you guys have done a great job improving the returns. Could you unpack though a little bit on the asset and wealth side? What are the drivers to improve the margin? You guys [indiscernible] that you're settling down, right? How should we think about that?

Sure. And look through the lens, when we started this journey 5 years ago, we had $5 billion of management fees. Now we have $10 billion of management fees. We've materially -- we've raised $250 billion in alternatives over the course of the last 5 years. We said on our fourth quarter earnings call, we expect to raise another $40 billion to $50 billion of alternatives this year.

Tough fundraising environment.

It's a tough fundraising environment, but we've got an extraordinary platform and we are pretty confident in our ability to continue to raise capital in alternatives. And by the way, it doesn't stop after this year. I mean, I think we're going to raise a lot of alternatives on a go-forward basis. We have a very, very strong platform. We said we can grow our management fees high single digits. So if you look at the compounding of management fees by high single digits, and you look at that, that provides more margin, obviously, in. We've raised a lot of money that's not yet on fee that has to be deployed. So we have $485 billion, I believe, of alternatives -- again, don't hold me to it exactly. But I think a little less than $300 billion, about $290 billion is on fee at the moment. And so as we deploy more capital, that also -- that helps on that fee growth. And then we're taking the balance sheet down and the volatility of the balance sheet, which obviously affects margins. And so that combination of activities, we believe, can drive our margins to 25%, and if we drive the margins to 25% and you get the capital down, which we're doing, you get to mid-teens returns. Now if you look at a business like that of that scale and you take a longer-term view, you should be able, you should be able, to do more with it than that. And so we're very focused on that. But I think we've made a lot of progress on the journey, and we'll continue to give you benchmarks as we go forward as to how that progress continues.

Yes. And you guys aren't alone. A lot of the asset managers we cover are -- the margins, they're working to improve them. So it's definitely a broad thing. You drilled down into -- you mentioned the $40 billion to $50 billion in fundraising that you guys are looking to do. There's been a lot of attention on the fundraising around the [ alts ], Blackstone and Ares talk about it a lot. So which of the asset classes and areas that you are most excited about and think that there's the greatest demand from investors ?

Well, there's no question everybody is talking about private credit. I think there's a lot of opportunity in private credit. And we feel we're a scaled player at $130 billion. But candidly, given when we started, had we been more of an institutional [ event ] fundraiser for the last 20 years, we should have $300 billion of private credit. So I think there's an enormous opportunity for this firm with its platform. And by the way, we have an enormous advantage given the integration of our firm and what we see. And so there's this narrative that private credit [indiscernible] intermediaries and the banks. I think that narrative is overstated. But at the same point, we also sit in both worlds and have an ability to take advantage of the fact that we sit in both worlds. And I think that's very, very powerful for us. We're going to raise in 2024 our ninth large-scale private equity fund. We'll launch what we call Capital Partners IX, which is our next private equity fund, which will be a significant fundraising. We just completed an infrastructure fund raise. We raised our first two years ago, our first growth capital fund, it was a $5 billion first time growth capital fund. There obviously will be growth capital, too, as we continue to deploy. I think one of the things that's interesting about our platform is our platform is truly global. And we're in private equity, growth equity, credit, infrastructure, there was some press this week about a partnership we had with a large capital allocator in Asian Credit. And so you look at that, when you step back, there are very few people that have the full product capability, with very strong performance and the full product capability. And 90% of our alternatives funds are in the top 50% from a performance perspective. Very few people that have the performance across the full spectrum of products and have true global reach in terms of what they do. And so with the capital allocators, I think we're very well positioned to continue to grow, provided we perform, and we're very focused on that.

Right, and you touched on private credit, is a very, very hot topic right now. You touched on it. Can you talk a little bit -- I don't think everybody really fully understands your heritage in private credit. Maybe could you...

The firm's heritage?

Your firm's heritage.

Yes. The firm was very early in the private credit business, because we created 25 years ago one of, if not the first, large-scale mezzanine fund. And so we were operating with mezzanine funds that were 5x larger than anybody else in the market and had been financing our clients that way, first with what we call mezz partners and then with loan partners, the top of the capital structure, and we were just early in that business. And we built it to a pretty significant business, but we didn't over the last 7 or 8 years because of the Volcker Rule and the way we were scaling stuff on balance sheet as opposed to in fund form, we did not over the last decade start early enough to scale it with institutional capital the way we should have. We've now been doing that the last 5 years and making a lot of progress.

Outstanding. We'd love to transition to Wealth Management and spend a little time there. Given that you just sold PFM, what do you think the growth drivers are for Wealth and how are you thinking about that business?

Well, the ultra-high net worth business, where I think we have the leading franchise, is growing very, very nicely. And so if you look at that business, that business has $1.3 trillion, $1.4 trillion of assets and over $8 billion of revenue, and it's growing north of 10% compounding over the course of the last 5 years. And it's a very, very fragmented business. We have a great brand and a leadership position. We're very, very focused on the service to our clients, and we have an ability to put more people on the field and grow that business and a lot of room to do that all over the world. And so we've got a very, very focused plan to continue to invest in the growth of that. We think we can continue to grow that business very, very nicely organically for the next 5-plus years.

Right. So it's not a -- the sale of PFM is not some sort of indication that's not a strategic priority.

We looked at PFM, and the thesis at the time was that if you brought a platform like that in and you rolled up other platforms that you could scale it. But when we looked at it inside of Goldman Sachs, we just decided that the scale economics would not move the needle as much as deploying capital more quickly into the ultra-high net worth business. We will get better returns on that capital, and that was a better use of our energy, capital and deployment. And so we -- again, it's one of the things we're trying to do very well. And I think this is an important thing for anybody that's running a big scale business. You try things. Sometimes they don't work. The hard thing is saying, that's not working, let's turn it off because we see a better opportunity, and doing that as quickly as you can do that, be very, very unemotional, saying, okay, we tried that, we were wrong, we're going to change it. And PFM is an example. We were wrong. We changed it. We didn't linger. We changed it, and that's giving us the flexibility to deploy more capital and growing the Wealth Management business and the ultra high net worth space, where we think we're very uniquely positioned.

Right. And given the ultra-high net worth focus, then thinking about the alts conversation that we just had.

Well, I mean alts, our high net worth system drove our alternatives platform for a long time. One of the reasons we don't have the institutional breadth that I wish we had is because 20 years ago, the way the business ran, firm put a bunch of money in a fund, we turned to the wealthy individuals in our private system and said we're putting 30% of the fund in, you want to come along? They're like, you guys are investing? Sure, we'll come along. We didn't have to go out. We didn't have to go to Sacramento and Austin and here and there, called our private wealth system the firm's money. Bump. Financial crisis, Volcker, that doesn't work anymore, that model didn't work, and it took us a while to readjust and move forward. But that private wealth system has had a tremendously successful run, okay, in our alternatives platform. And one of the things that our private wealth investors, the wealthiest people, will really understand is our performance in that space has been excellent relative to the peers that we get benchmarked against. And we haven't talked enough about that. If you look at our performance, for example, in our private equity product, our performance, okay, has been better than Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle, et cetera. The performance has been excellent. Our private wealth investors understand that. And so we're going to continue to tell that story, and hopefully, we can continue to broaden that capability. But the private wealth system is hugely important to our alternatives franchise.

Right. You guys were early money on that trend.

And it's an open -- by the way, it's an open system, so we also raised money for other people more broadly, and our clients really like that.

Yes. Efficiency ratio, the expense side, that's definitely gotten a lot of attention here recently.

It's been higher than 60%.

Yes, that's true, we might not be good with numbers, but we can at least see the greater than. How are you thinking about managing the expense base here in 2024, and how you think about driving operating leverage into the system?

Yes. So a lot of -- I mean the firm, this has been a bumpy couple of years. The firm's sized for a revenue outcome that's been better than what the last two years has delivered given the environment, given the headwinds we had with consolidated investment entities, with marks on the balance sheet. And so we have a very, very strong view that the base revenues of the firm are higher, and therefore the expense of the firm and the investments we're making in the firm will provide operating leverage against that as we look forward from here. And so we feel very good about that. We've been very disciplined and very controlled on our noncomp expenses away from the kind of one-offs that we tried to provide more transparency on last year. But if you look -- if you take the one-offs out and you look at our non-comp expenses, we really ran our noncomp expenses relatively flat and we continue to be focused on being as tight as we can on non-comp. So the firm is levered to a certain revenue expectation. We believe we're going to meet that revenue expectation, which delivers better operating margin. If for some reason we're wrong about that, we will adjust, and I think we've got a very good track record of showing, when we need to adjust our expense base, we can adjust quickly and relatively swiftly. We've got a long history of doing that. But I think the firm is sized right and we're making the right investments for the next 3 to 5 years for the firm to perform very well, and that's a target that will continue to guide us in our decision-making.

And when you think about it's been challenging because 2023 was such an important year as far as exiting some of the businesses. I mean, is there any idea around the quantum of expenses that are just going to come out purely from the math of those businesses getting sold?

Sure. I mean, it wouldn't surprise you that we have transparency when you sell things as to how many people come out and what are embedded costs that stay or are allocated around the firm, what goes. So we of course have very, very strong detailed work on all that and we're very, very thoughtful about that. But we -- when you look at 2023, I think 2023 was a year of really great execution across a set of priorities we said we were going to move forward on it. And 2024 should have materially less noise in it than 2023 had.

Amen. So bringing all of that together, can you maybe give us what -- an idea about what gives you confidence in the positioning of the firm going forward?

Yes. I feel -- as I said -- I'm going to repeat what I said earlier, Brennan, I think the firm is really, really well positioned. First and foremost, I'd just say the firm is filled with extraordinary people. We have extraordinary talent. The bench is extraordinarily deep. We have an incredible ecosystem of attracting people to the firm, whether it's coming out of school, where I think we have one of the most extraordinary hiring machines for individuals out of school, to people that go all the way up the chain senior. We -- and we do this often, we go out in the world and we say, in this space, who are the best people in the world, let's go hire them. And if we want to set our mind to hiring somebody, we generally can do that. And so we're very, very thoughtful about that. So it starts with the fact that we have extraordinary people. We have a deep, deep talent bench and the firm has always been a dynamic manager of talent. People come, they work, they go. We have -- that's the way the firm's always operated. And I think the talent infrastructure of the firm is in incredible shape. We now have these two great businesses. We've materially simplified the structure. We have Global Banking & Markets. We have Asset & Wealth Management. In Global Banking & Markets, we can continue to take some share. We can continue to grow financing. We're a leader in that business. In Asset & Wealth Management, we have a clear path to high single-digit revenue growth, improved margins, and therefore meeting our targeted returns while continuing to grow our management fees across that business. And we'll continue to be very disciplined and operate the firm efficiently. And if we just execute on those things -- and that's what we're focused on, we're focused on executing -- if we execute across that, the firm is going to do very, very well. And I think we've got the firm set up, aligned and executing in a way where -- the environment, I can't tell you exactly how the environment will vary, but I can tell you, we're going to continue to execute and make progress on what we've set out to do.

Excellent. That's a great note to end on. David, thanks a lot for your time.

Thank you very much. Much pleasure. Thank you, Brennan. Thank you for having me. Thank you.