Virtus Investment Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRTS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

George Aylward: Yes. And we definitely — as we sort of look at how our retail investors increasingly want to access capabilities. Obviously, the growth is really going to be in the retail separate accounts in the ETFs. Open-end funds as a product category has various challenges in terms of where it is in terms of its trajectory and is currently apparently the preferred source of funding when you need to move money into cash. So ETFs, again, we had positive flows in ETFs. We’ve been thoughtfully putting out our capabilities on the ETF side. So it’s a small part of our business, but it is definitely growing. And it’s also where we have a lot of our focus for new offerings. And to your specific comment, and I think, we referenced it in our prepared remarks, we’re in the process of expanding our actively managed fixed income strategies in particular.

So we’ve had several — we’ve actually — expect to expand that and expand those capabilities as well as in some of our other noncorrelated strategies. So as we look at that space for us, it will generally be more of the actively managed, differentiated and those products that are attractive in the ETF wrapper, which is attractive for a lot of reasons. And increasingly, we’re seeing a lot of those reasons really relate to the tax efficiency of that. So I think that’s kind of similar to the retail separate accounts, which again, has been a very strong part of our business, what we continue to see that as an area to sort of expand our area of success, which has been overweight equity types of capabilities, and we continue to develop and launch other types of retail separate accounts because, again, they’re a very attractive access point for a lot of what we’re seeing in the growth of the retail market.

Michael Cyprys: Great. And if I could just squeeze one more question in here, just on the expense side. Just curious what it would take to bring the comp ratio below 49% below that low end of the range. What you would need to see for that to happen as you look out on maybe a multiyear basis? And then just on the G&A side, non-comp, you could just talk about some of the actions that you guys are taking that enabled you to bring down the range and just how you think about that pace of growth going forward.

George Aylward: A couple of comments, and Mike will add to that. So in terms of the expense ratio, generally, the biggest driver is actually the revenue impact as opposed to the employment expense impact. Because most of — we have a high percentage of variable employment costs, and they’ll vary, as Mike stated, in terms of profitability, in terms of sales, in terms of other kinds of metrics. So a lot of times, the volatility you see in the metric is really going to be driven by — we had that period where there was just a really strong market trajectory and then that ratio was going down. And it was really not about the expense line. It was actually about the revenue line. So we continue to think that variable expenses are a benefit to have and it will be impacted based upon that. Mike, do you want to comment on the deployment and then…

Mike Angerthal: Yes. I think just generally speaking on the expense side, we were pleased this quarter to have incremental margins above 75%. Really all we said the business is leverageable, and you see that in those incremental margins that emerged this quarter, I think on the employment road, as George said, there’s a significant amount of variability in the compensation structure, which will vary based on profitability and sales. And then certainly, the biggest driver will be market. So that’s something that we’ll continue to provide information on if we get to the lower end or below that range in the market environment. I think on other operating, we’ve been focused on the discretionary expenditures for the last year, 1.5 years, really trying to offset the impacts that we’ve seen from inflationary pressure from our service providers and vendors.