AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. (NYSE:AB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Onur Erzan : Thanks Seth. That’s great summary. If I were to add a few minor things, we are number one. We are on track to launch our first interval fund out of CarVal, the opportunistic credit interval fund. We expect that to help us both, in our own private wealth channel, as well as in third party channels. So that’s going to be a nice addition to our lineup. As you know, we have done non-traded BDC and REIT kind of structures in our private wealth before. But this is the first time we are launching an interval fund, both for our internal and external clients, so excited about that. And then as Seth mentioned, our private alternate UM [ph] continues to grow and we have a significant amount of dry powder. And in this environment as the M&A activity accelerates as the price discovery in real-estate comes to an end, I think we will have plenty of good opportunities in attractive vintages that should help our deployment returns, as well as in certain cases where we have performance fees and carry also those aspects of our revenue structure.

Alex Blostein: Got you. I’m sorry. And what was that dry powder number again that will turn on upon deployment?

Onur Erzan : Yeah sure. Our dry powder, if I include all the channels would be around $14 billion.

Alex Blostein: Got it. Okay great. For my follow-up, I wanted to dig into your active ETF offering. I know it’s small, approaching about $1 billion in the context of the firm. It’s not huge, but it’s been an important driver near term of flows for you guys. So as you sort of think about the forward strategy, Seth, I think you mentioned a couple of new launches as you look out into 2024. What’s the vision for the active ETF business and where are you finding the most success? Is that largely distributed through the private wealth business within Alliance Bernstein or you’re seeing success with third party channels as well?

Seth Bernstein : Actually, I’m going to pass it to Carl. I’m sorry, I’m going to pass it to Onur, because I think he’s closer, but I’m more interested in what you have to say Onur.

Onur Erzan : Yeah sure. Thanks again Seth. Yeah we’re excited about the progress to date of our active ETF business. We had our first anniversary in September and we hit almost $1 billion of AUM, which is a very good launch, which puts us I think one out of five in terms of successful launches in this space. We have multiple paths to success. In our view, it’s not only our proprietary channel, private wealth. We have actually got a lot of good wins in third party channels. In terms of the vision, I think the vision is three parts. One, complement our vehicle agnostic strategy with active ETFs, where that vehicle agnostic strategy helps clients. So we touched on muni area in the previous question for instance. So we are complementing our muni SMAs with ETFs. So that definitely is an additive strategy.

Helps with our momentum, so definitely that vehicle extension is one part of the strategy. Second part of the strategy is opening new doors. Obviously our area, space is a heavy user of ETFs. Historically they were passive ETF users, but we are seeing more and more interest in the active ETF wrapper from those channels. So that helps us open new doors. And then finally, there’s still a broader set of opportunities in institutional, including insurance clients when you achieve certain thresholds in terms of AUM, etc. Given the liquidity of fixed income ETFs for instance, we are quite optimistic about the long term prospects as well. So that’s our go-forward strategy and you will see us add products across equities, fixed income and multi assets such as buffer.

Seth Bernstein : And I would just add Alex, while private wealth will increasingly be an important user I think given their needs, the real driver isn’t private wealth at the moment. It really is third party, who are looking at it as building blocks for portfolios they are managing.