Federated Hermes, Inc. (NYSE:FHI) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

The second one is something like this gives an indication. This is neither a forecast or it’s just simply the numbers are the numbers. But it gives you an indication of how private markets work, which is there’s a lot of revenue that is generated within private markets, it comes through these lumpy carry payments that happen over time, which we do not predict, but you can look at our past strategies and the notes as actually the press release and you can see the averages over time. And that’s an integral part of how we do it. Now we have established an incredibly strong reputation in all parts of private markets and private equities. The track record is outstanding. And that’s part of why we managed to posed above our expectations in property.

It’s the same in direct revenue and so on. So it’s a combination of us keeping clients – of actually expanding our client bases in many ways and then realizing the carry, some of which goes to the managers, which is typical with the private markets and some of it comes to ink, which is the house. So it gives you an insight, if you like, of how private markets works and how attractive this business is because of its stickiness, its longevity and the carrier’s interest that you generate within it for us as well as for our clients.

Tom Donahue: So Dan, the last comment that I have is we put in the net-net-net on all these things, which I understand are complicated to figure out. And that’s why we put in that an after-tax impact was only $800,000 when you take all these transactions and all these millions of dollars, we kind of wanted to give you an indication that that wouldn’t have impacted earnings too much about $800,000 exactly.

Daniel Fannon: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is coming from Patrick Davitt of Autonomous Research. Patrick, your line is live.

Patrick Davitt: Hi. Good morning, everyone. The press reported on some money fund fee cuts earlier in the month, but I think misrepresented the impact. So could you frame any immediate impact to the earnings model from those reported changes? And then more broadly, what exactly are the changes you made? And any color on the reasoning for the new framework? Thank you.

Raymond Hanley: Yes, Patrick, it’s Ray. We did in the beginning of May, the fund board approved a reduction in investment advisory fees on a group of our money funds. But as you indicated, there’s no impact to our revenue because we already had long-standing advisory fee waivers. So this was not revenue that we were collecting. It may have been reported as such or indicated that. In addition, in the beginning of July, we launched 10 new share classes on three of our treasury funds. And we did that to give clients additional product options and also have some consistency when looking at our treasury products compared to the government and prime funds when you look at things like expenses and minimum investments and some other features.

As a consequences of these creating these new share classes, certain number priced at 15 basis points net of waivers. And so that does represent on a new share class, a lower net effective fee rate than what was previously available. And that’s kind of in line with – moving in line with where some of the competition funds are and again, giving us consistency. We already had that pricing option on the government side, which is the bigger category. So those are the changes at a high level. Debbie, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that?

Debbie Cunningham: Yes. I think just that we really don’t expect it to be impactful in the assets in those products and any kind of shift that might take place between share classes within a product we expect to be modest at this point.