The Carlyle Group Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Carlyle Group second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference has been recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Daniel Harris, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning and welcome to Carlyle's second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me on the call this morning is our chief executive officer, Harvey Schwartz, and our chief financial officer, Justin Plouffe. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release and a detailed earnings presentation, which is available on our investor relations website. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures during today's call. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. We have provided reconciliation of these measures to GAAP in our earnings release to the extent reasonably available. Any forward-looking statements made today do not guarantee future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. These statements are based on current management expectations and involve inherent risks and uncertainties including those identified in the risk factor section of our annual report on Form 10-K that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated. Carlisle assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements at any time. In order to ensure participation by everyone on the line today, please limit yourself to one question and return to the queue for any additional follow-ups. With that, let me turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Harvey Schwartz.

Thanks, Dan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We delivered an outstanding second quarter with record results across our diversified global platform. Our momentum is the result of disciplined execution, focusing on investment performance, and delivering on our strategic plan. Highlights in the quarter include our highest level of distributed earnings in nearly four years at $472 million, which includes record distributed earnings in both Carlisle Alpinvest and Global Credit. Record FRE of $358 million, up 11% year-over-year, driven by record fee-related performed revenue and record capital markets fees. Net realized performance revenues increased more than five-fold from last quarter, and another strong quarter of inflows with nearly $17 billion. Our fundraising momentum is exceptional, with $56 billion of inflows over the last 12 months, a 10% increase from the prior year. All of this drove AUM to a record $485 billion. As we enter our fundraising super cycle, we've already attracted $30 billion of organic inflows in the first half of 2026, another firm record. In Carlisle Alpinvest, our strong start to the year continued with another 5 billion of inflows in the second quarter, including a final close of our single asset secondary strategy, capital for our portfolio finance strategy, and continued growth in our evergreen wealth solutions. In global private equity, this quarter was exceptionally busy. We raised an anchor commitment of $5 billion towards the first close of our U.S. buyout fund, and we've officially launched marketing for this strategy. We launched a dedicated defense and industrials platform and announced its first transaction, the acquisition of Syctorian Systems, an NSA-certified hardware data encryption provider. I'll give you more detail in a moment, but we also continue to be an industry leader in realizations. And in global credit, we attracted $6 billion of inflows with solid activity in structured credit, asset-backed finance, and flow reinsurance. Looking forward, we expect to have nearly all of our core strategies in the market raising capital over the next few years. This will support accelerating revenue and earnings across our platform, underpinning our conviction in our three-year strategic plan. Let me pivot to realizations. As I mentioned, Carlyle remains an industry leader and an outperformer in returning capital to our clients. We returned nearly $7 billion to our clients this quarter and $37 billion over the past year. Second quarter realizations were strong and diversified across asset classes and geographies. These include realizations in U.S. and Japan buyout, Financial Services, Real Estate, Opportunistic Credit, and Aviation, among others. In our largest private equity strategy, US Buyout, we've returned 23% of its fair value to investors over the last 12 months. I want to underscore that this is more than twice the current industry average, and also more than the long-term average for capital return of 20% for the industry. Lastly, Our global forward pipeline is similarly strong, with several announced transactions already closed in July or expected to close over the next few quarters. Shifting to deployment, we invested $14 billion this quarter, including several significant transactions in corporate private equity. Cervantes, the coatings business carved out from BASF, MAI Capital, an RIA and wealth management firm, and Tsukiko, a Japanese construction company. Those transactions and the capital raised for U.S. buyout helped generate record U.S. capital market fees of more than $100 million. This is a direct result of repositioning the capital markets business three years ago to capture a higher level of transaction fees across the platform. Again, these fees are high quality and very low risk earnings. In wealth and retirement, we continue to see strong momentum across the platform and are generating strong net inflows led by Carlyle Alpinvest. We generated over $7 billion in gross sales across evergreen wealth over the past year, driving AUM in these strategies to a record $20 billion. That's up more than 60% year over year. I'll now finish with a few thoughts on the macro backdrop. The market and U.S. economy continue to display a remarkable degree of resilience in the face of the war in the Middle East. Significant pressure on energy markets, stubborn inflation, and increasing public market volatility related to questions around AI. When we look at our proprietary data, largely KPIs rolled up each month across our nearly 300 portfolio companies, we see a U.S. economy that continues to expand at an annual rate of 2% to 2.5% in real terms, with 6% annual growth in corporate revenues. While there are some pockets of stress from the Hormuz-related price shock, U.S. consumption continues to grow at an impressive rate overall. Outside of the U.S., the positive effects of the AI CapEx boom are visible across Asia, and reality seems better than market perceptions in Europe. The energy impact is real, but so too are the defense and infrastructure-related industrial orders, which made a meaningful contribution to growth in recent months. All these near-term market dynamics continue to support the longer-term considerations that drive the need for capital investment around the world. National security issues including defense spending, energy security, data security, and an urgent focus on economic growth across the industrials and healthcare sectors are driving a demand for durable capital across the globe. This longer-term macro landscape maps directly to where Carlyle is positioned to lead and deliver. As you firmly said before, the demand for private capital continues to grow and is growing in areas where Carlyle has built deep sector expertise for decades. With that, let me turn the call over to Justin.

Thanks, Harvey, and good morning, everyone. As Harvey mentioned, we had a strong second quarter with results that reflect the continued operating momentum and diversification across our platform. We generated distributable earnings of $472 million in the second quarter for $1.07 per share. As Harvey noted, this was our best pre-tax DE quarter in nearly four years, powered by record FRE and a substantial step-up in net realized performance revenue from the first quarter. Fee-related earnings were a record $358 million, up 11% year-over-year at a 47% margin. In the second quarter, fund management fees were $560 million, up 3% from the first quarter. Carlisle Alpha Invest management fees increased 10% year-to-date as we are benefiting from strong momentum across that segment. Transaction fees were a record $111 million, more than double the level a year ago and up more than 30% year-to-date. As we've said, capital markets revenues are a natural extension of the activity happening across the firm, and you're continuing to see that accelerate as our momentum continues across businesses. Fee-related performance revenues were a record $89 million in the quarter, more than double last year's second quarter, and were driven by continued strength in our evergreen strategies, notably in Carlyle AlphaVest and asset-backed finance within Global Credit. Turning now to inflows, we had another very strong quarter, raising $16.8 billion with solid activity across all three segments. This quarter included $5 billion of commitments earmarked for our next vintage U.S. buyout fund in global private equity, continued momentum in our Carlyle Alpenvest secondaries and portfolio finance strategies, and the closing of three new issue U.S. CLOs along with increasing flow reinsurance activity in global credit. Turning now to the segments, Carlyle Alpenvest delivered record distributable earnings of $96 million in the quarter. and the related earnings of 87 million were up 27% compared to the second quarter of 2025. Total AUM at Carlyle Alpha Invest reached $112 billion of 16% year over year with $4.5 billion of inflows driven by our secondaries and portfolio finance strategies as well as continued inflows into our evergreen strategies. Our second vintage single asset secondary strategy closed at four times larger than its predecessor fund. Shifting to global credit, we also delivered record distributable earnings of $158 million, up more than 30% year over year. Fee-related earnings of $138 million were also a record, nearly 25% higher than the prior record set in the second quarter of 2025. That growth was driven by record transaction fees of $93 million and record fee-related performance revenue of $54 million, nearly twice the level of a year ago. Total AUM in global credit was $211 billion, up 4% year-over-year, and inflows for the last 12 months totaled $25 billion. Deployment was $7 billion in the quarter, led by our U.S. liquid credit, direct lending, and opportunistic credit strategies. Credit quality across the portfolio remains strong, and the diversification we've built continues to position this business to perform through market cycles. We also announced in Global Credit, alongside Fortitude RE, a second block reinsurance transaction with Unum. The transaction is expected to close later this year, and upon closing, should add more than $5 billion to Global Credit AUM. In Global Private Equity, fee-related earnings were $134 million, and distributable earnings were $219 million. DE rose nearly 50% sequentially on a significant increase in net realized performance revenue. Realized proceeds were $3.9 billion in the quarter and over $20 billion for the last 12 months, reflecting our continued prioritization of returning capital to fund investors. As Harvey noted, our U.S. buyout strategy has returned capital at more than double the industry rate over the past year. In the second quarter, our realized net performance revenues were driven by Japan buyout and our sixth U.S. buyout fund. Across the firm, net accrued performance revenues were $2.4 billion and remain a significant source of future shareholder earnings at nearly $7 of free tax earnings per share. Finally, let me turn to capital management. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet and declared a quarterly dividend of $0.35 per common share consistent with our dividend policy. We saw a very attractive opportunity to repurchase CG shares during the quarter. We were active buyers deploying a record $304 million to repurchase or withhold 6.7 million shares. We reduced our adjusted share count by more than 1% this year, with $1.6 billion still remaining on our $2 billion repurchase authorization. Investing in growth remains our first priority, but will continue to be disciplined and opportunistic as it relates to returning capital to shareholders. We entered the third quarter with strong momentum across the platform. We see substantial growth opportunities in every segment, and we will continue to take advantage of solid capital markets to drive realizations and new investments. With that, let me turn it back to the operator to take your questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Stephen Chubak with Wolf Research. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning, Harvey and Justin. Thanks for taking my question.

Hey, good morning, Stephen.

So, I was hoping to drill down into the fundraising outlook. You've had a strong start to the year, $30 billion raised in the first half, tracking up about 8% year-on-year. Can you remind us which funds will be in the market in the back half? and how that informs the outlook for both fundraising as well as management fee growth in the second half.

Yeah, we had a great first half in fundraising. One of the best halves we've ever had in terms of organic inflows. and it's really across many different strategies. As you know, we're entering the super cycle in the second half. We really just started that. So in the quarter, $5 billion earmarked for US buyout will also be over the next 24 months in the market with basically every single one of our flagship funds in terms of secondaries, portfolio finance, credit opportunities, and obviously we have a fantastic defense and reindustrialization platform. So we really have these numbers in the first half without really leaning into the flagship strategies that are coming to market. So our momentum there is really great. And I'll call out one more thing on fundraising. Our inflows for our wealth platform were actually up more than 60% year over year. So in wealth, we're building an incredibly good platform and really see good momentum there.

Any expectation just on back half fundraising and management fee growth, just given the funds that will be in the market?

Those funds are really going to start accelerating in the second half. You're not going to see, as we talked about on the investor day, you're not going to see closure, closing on those funds. But the momentum is pretty meaningful and is Justin also mentioned we also had the Unum transaction, which will close later this year, so there's already sort of $5 billion, but we're not going to give you specific guidance on quarter-to-quarter. There'll be timing issues and things like that, but the underlying message should not be confused. The momentum across the platform is enormous, and the pipeline of fundraising is very broad in all our key strategies.

Thanks for all that additional color. Much appreciated.

Sure, Steve. Have a great end of the summer.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexander Bluestein with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning. Hey, Harvey. Hey, Justin. I wanted to dig into two specific areas for you guys on the wealth channel. One, I was hoping to double-click into the May capital acquisition that you highlighted and how that could potentially accelerate and broaden your ambitions in the wealth channel. And second, in May, you guys launched a private market solution with Alliance Bernstein and Brookfield. So curious if you have any early feedback to share with us on how material this could be in your plans in the defined contribution space.

So thanks for the questions, Alex. So just taking a step back, over the past several years, We have very systematically studied how to think about the various channels across wealth and retirement and been systematically putting the building blocks together for a strategy that we think really leverages the brand. And we were very selective about how we thought about partnerships and growth. And so earlier this year, we hired a head of our retirement practice. And so you're starting to see all this come together. We do think the 401 channel, along with the target state fund channel, will be very significant over time. So we were selected by Alliance Bernstein as this particular solution. We also announced with SEI as a trustee for the CIT launches. And so you'll start to see that begin to manifest itself over time. This is not a third, fourth quarter material thing. You're going to start to see this build, I think, in 27. I can't put a pin in the date. But more importantly, taking a step back, I think it's a real indication of how the team is coming together. and thinking very strategically. We want to be very effective at the partnerships and the solutions we put together versus it takes a lot of work to do these. We don't want to put too many in the market. We've been very selective about how we've done this. And so that's how that's important how we're approaching it. The MAI acquisition that was actually done in our U.S. buyout business So that's a portfolio company not unlike other portfolio companies. The team's super excited about it. It's a great business. You know, as a fiduciary, we have an obligation. Our LPs there, often we work with our portfolio companies when there's opportunities, but we're excited about that business.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Brennan Hawken with BMO. Your line is now open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Hey, Brian. Hey, Harvey. Good to hear from you. So the comp ratio picked up a little bit quarter to quarter. You guys had a really strong result in FRPR and transaction revenues, which is both growth avenues for you. Could you help us understand, is the comp ratio on those revenue lines maybe a little bit different? Could that have had something to do with it? And how should we think about those lines as we begin to model out growth?

Yeah, Brendan, we expect the comp ratio this year to be roughly consistent with last year, around that 47%. And the reason is because we're investing back in the business, right? We've said in many occasions, we want to invest for growth. And we're investing right now, not just into our people, but also in AI and technology, which we think is critical to our next phase of growth and our wealth platform. So in terms of the outlook for margin, I think we'll be in that 47% range for this year. And then as all the fundraising we've talked about starts to flow through the financials in 27 and 28, that's what I'd expect to see the margin tick up. The important thing here is that we're focused, number one, on growth in 2026, and that's why we're investing back in the business. Makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the call, Justin. Thanks, Brandon.

Our next question comes from the line of Mike Brown with UBS. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask Mike the capital. Good morning. I want to ask on the capital markets side of the business, it's certainly become a more meaningful contributor to the bottom line. Can you just double-click on some of the key drivers for this quarter and then just touch on whether you see this level of activity continuing to broaden out and just touch on the run rate as we start to think about the back half of 26 and 27?

Yeah, so thanks. Mike for the question. So as we've discussed a couple years ago, three years ago, we systematically deployed across the firm this strategy. And I would say like all new business strategies, you know, there's that beginning period where, you know, you walk before you run. And now I just say it's part of the muscle memory of the firm and very much part of a culture to do this. And so you will see this correlate with our growth and activity. So if you see high activity, you're going to see this. Quarter to quarter, the numbers may move around a fair bit. Personally, I think that's completely irrelevant to how you should think about the value generation here. The business will systematically continue to grow as the firm grows and as we launch new funds, particularly as Justin says, we come into this super cycle where all the flagship funds are raising money. That all compounds. And so in a very, very positive way, it creates this enormous flywheel effect. which we expect to manifest over the next couple years. In terms of transaction flows, this was a strong quarter. I don't expect you to see that in the third or the fourth quarter this year, but again, I think it's completely irrelevant. The more important takeaway is the momentum in this business and the fact that it's systematically part of the firm now. And then as we raise these bigger funds and you see activity, it's got this fantastic flywheel effect.

Okay, very clear. Thanks for the call there, Harvey.

Thanks. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Bedell with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Brian Bedell Great. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Good morning. If we could dive a little bit deeper on the defense and industrials platform that you're building out. Clearly, this is a really strong brand for Carlyle for quite a long time. How do you think – maybe give us some context on – The growth trajectory there in terms of how it fits in with the fundraising super cycles. What types of other products can you launch over the next, say, 12 to 18 months in this area? And do you foresee creating a wealth product here as well?

So let's take a big step back. And the firm, as you know, was formed in 1987. And sort of like a lot of things in life, accident of birth, David Rubenstein forms the firm in DC, which was just a very natural starting point for our platform in aerospace defense and government services. And it's been a core feature of the firm in terms of our skill set and expertise. And the first transaction we did as a firm actually was in this space. And so over nearly 40 years, we've been building this practice. Obviously, events around the world, geopolitical splintering, Russia-Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, and you've seen the numbers. If you tally up all the numbers for the next decade, I think defense spending globally as a global priority now, whether it's in Europe, Canada, obviously the U.S., even Japan, areas of the world that historically haven't invested as much. I think the numbers in aggregate should total as much to $8 trillion. So we're the only large-scale firm that has this history of this practice. And what we've seen now is obviously this is a core component in terms of a sector expertise in our U.S. buyout business, our large U.S. buyout business. But we're also seeing Huge demand from LPs who have interest in this space, and we're seeing lots of deal flow. And the deal flow has gone up so dramatically that the investing team thought it was in the best interest of the LPs to have a sleeve that could focus, for lack of a better language, on more middle market expertise. Now, obviously, this could be something that we can build upon. But again, we're just really focused on How we address this global macro trend, and that's what this is. It's run under the same hub, same experts. Chairman of the business has been doing this for well over 30 years at Carlyle, so we feel very good about this. In terms of the wealth, we're going to continue to think about wealth. I'm not sure this particular, I'm not going to give a hard answer on this because we want to be very thoughtful about the wealth channel. I'm not sure a sleeve in this space Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Davitt of Autonomous Research. Your line is now open.

As you highlighted, a nice pickup in realized performance fees, and you mentioned more deals in the pipeline here in July. Could you put a little bit more specifics around that comment, even more broadly just how that pipeline compares to last quarter, and to what extent that balance actually gives you visibility on a path to reported performance fees actually getting even better in the second half? Thank you.

Sure, yeah. I mean, this is all about realizations, and we've been a leader in realizations across the market. You know, we said in the first quarter we had great realizations. It was just the mix, and that for the rest of the year, as that mix changed, that those realizations would ultimately result in net realized performance revenue. You saw that in the second quarter. We've had some Very nice deals in July already, although I would say the third quarter historically tends to be a little bit less in terms of transaction flow because you have the months of July and August in there. But we feel great about realizations. And as you know, realizations are very difficult to predict quarter to quarter. But the pace of realizations that we've had across the firm is really a market-leading pace. And the capital markets are open. We think that there is a good prospect for continued realizations in the second half of the year. So we feel very good about our realization pace and ultimately in the second half that should result in good momentum in the net realized performance revenues.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Buttish with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning and thanks for taking my question. One of the other line items that surprised in the quarter was your fee-related performance revenues. I know there's a number of evergreen funds that contribute to that line, but it seemed a bit outsized. Could you maybe just unpack a little bit the key drivers in this quarter? And I imagine, like your transaction fees, this is something that, as these funds grow, will also kind of compound over time. But any color you can give on this quarter and maybe any sort of changing expectations we should be thinking about as we think through the next 12 to 24 months. Thank you.

Sure. The big driver is really the growth of our wealth channel. As I said, our inflows year-to-date over 60% higher than they were last year, and that ultimately is what's going to drive that fee-related performance revenue line. There was this quarter one fund in asset-backed finance that flipped from a carry structure to a performance fee structure, so that's in there. But the big drivers here are really the continued growth of the wealth platform and specifically the Alpinvest business. I mean, we've seen just tremendous demand for our Alpinvest wealth products. And as we continue to get on new platforms, as we move forward, obviously, with our private equity solution, CPEP, which is also getting on a number of new platforms, then I would expect that line item to continue to grow at a very nice rate.

Just to double check, Justin, does that mean that the credit FRPR, all things equal, assuming continued NAV growth, that's kind of the new run rate and it steps up from here?

Not necessarily. There was a small one time in this quarter, but that credit ABF fund will now be part of the run rate going forward. So quarter to quarter, again, very difficult to predict exactly where the performance revenues are coming out, but that fund will be in that line item. And all the demand we're seeing in wealth, that's going to move that line item up over time as we go into 27. Great. Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question is from the line of Devin Ryan of Citizens Bank. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning, Harvey and Justin. Thanks for taking the question. Question directly on Alpinvest and coming off of another great quarter of the FRE there. I'd just love to get a sense of how you're thinking about where that business is today and where it's headed and how much Activity right now is just being driven by kind of more near-term liquidity needs versus a more permanent shift in just how portfolio construction is being done, or even kind of the higher bar you just mentioned with the wealth distribution, such as just trying to get a sense of how you're thinking about where that business is cyclically versus the secular tailwinds just coming off of some nice momentum. Thanks.

Yeah, so, well, thanks for the question. I think you kind of nailed it with the cyclical and the secular because clearly there's a cyclical tailwind. We won't unpack all the numbers here, but if you actually look again, we're an outlier on realizations, but the industry hasn't been. and that's created an enormous opportunity which we see really persisting for the next several years. So I don't personally believe we're yet at a cyclical peak. We're in a long cycle, extended cycle where secondaries will continue to grow, continue to perform well and obviously we're one of the few hyperscalers in the world that have the capability, the global footprint to capture all that at the right time. And they've been in this business now for 26 years. And so it's an extraordinary team with great performance. I think that there's a secular shift here, which we've talked about before, which is really about how these businesses are truly now corporate finance solutions providers. You know, if you went back several years, it was really about the secondaries business, which was really more a point-to-point business in some respects. But now our dialogue around the world with GPs and LPs is really about portfolio repositioning, how to think about the optimized portfolio, how do GPs create value for themselves and grow their businesses. And so that is really more of a, it sounds more like a corporate finance solutions business. You see the success now of our single asset fund closed this quarter. Portfolio Finance Fund. So when you think about Alpenbest, you really need to think about the full 360-degree circle, not just secondaries. And then, obviously, the client constituency of wealth and institutional. And wealth, I do think this business is uniquely built for the wealth audience because it's got so much diversification. and has obviously the Carlisle brand behind it. So I think there's both cyclical and secular tailwinds, but I think both of those are pretty persistent for a period of time.

Great color. Thanks, Harvey.

Our next question comes from Dan Fannin of Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Great, thanks. I had a question on fundraising and with all the flagships coming to market here in the coming years, Can you talk about just the fundraising market more broadly? How are LPs doing, you know, currently? And from a timing perspective, are you seeing, you know, the periods for that fundraising being extended, shortened, or just generally, you know, kind of the outlook versus maybe previous periods?

Level engagement is very high. Nothing changed since our, in terms of our view, you know, obviously parts of the wealth panel, specifically credit, are More quiet, although that seems to be abating, certainly for us and more broadly for the industry. But away from that, wealth channel feels quite good. Wealth creation around the world feels good. Institutional interaction is, you know, you want to be in the right business lines at the right time. And as we talked about, sort of the old economy is a new economy right now. And so the sectors that we focus in and the geographies we focus in, the power alleys really line up well. So no change to what we described to you back at the beginning of the year. We really think this super cycle, we still feel confident about that $200 billion number. But it feels like the momentum's quite good.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks.

Our next question comes from the line of Glenn Shore of Evercore. Your line is now open.

Hi, thanks very much. How you doing, Glenn? Not too bad, thank you. I wanted to ask a little bit about the capital intensity of the business in the industry. I mean, for you guys, you run a pretty capital-light business, and that's your intention. You did put up a little bit for this SPV on CP9. There's this infrastructure investment. But in general, your mindset is to run pretty capital-light. Around the industry, I see more on the insurance side. So I guess industry-level question, but for you two, Do you see GPs leaning more to help drive fundraising and growth via some balance sheet deployment? And is that actually a huge competitive advantage for the handful of large-scale players like you?

I think the way we've approached it, I think your point of emphasis is correct. We like the capital life business. As a lien, however, having said that, we're obviously happy to deploy our capital where we think we can use it most efficiently. So ideally what we want to do is get maximum bank for a buck, maximum ROI for every marginal unit of balance sheet. And you've seen us do this. And so I think as we invest, and Justin touched on this, when we make the decision, the relative decision about how do we return the capacity we have under the $2 billion buyback, Thank you for joining us. lack of better language, we're pretty religious about the math on that, okay? So we want to make sure that every marginal dollar balance sheet as it gets deployed, because we think of it as a truly scarce asset, sometimes internally I refer to it as one of my kids, but it's probably not great for my family to hear, but I do think of balance sheet capital as like family, and we're very protective of it. And I think there are ways that the industry will go in the future where you'll continue to see creative use Thanks, Harb.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Cypress of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to circle back to one of your earlier comments about reinvesting back in the business. One of the areas you called out was AI and technology-related investments. I was hoping you could unpack that a bit more. I'm curious where AI is having the most measurable financial impact on the business today. And if you could touch upon how you're redesigning workflows and how you expect the financial impact to progress over the next couple of years.

So I'll give you the big picture on that. You know, we're 2,500 people at Carlyle, maybe the precise headcount is 2,600, but we're roughly 2,500 people across, but obviously across our portfolio companies. We have 750,000 employees. We're one of the largest employers in the world across aerospace, defense, government services, healthcare, financial services, industrials, et cetera, globally. And so from our perspective, the way we think about data science, AI, and technology is maybe overly simplified two ways. One is how can we work with all of our portfolio companies to make sure that they're completely enabled and have access to all the resources around the world so that those CEOs, those management teams can deploy technology in the most efficient way. And they obviously have the flexibility to do that. And we work very closely with them on that across the global platform. Internally at Carlyle, and the reason I started out with the 2,500 employees is because really for us, this is not about, you know, we're not a large organization, a large bank with, you know, 100, 200, 300,000 people where we're trying to think of, oh, how can we reduce headcount by 10%? That's not how we're approaching this. The way we're thinking about data science is how can we use this data science as it continues to evolve to run our business more effectively, have better investment outcomes. How can we help our teams make the best choices? By the way, that's how do our investment teams work? How do we run Carlyle? So that's how we're thinking about it at a very high level. I won't go through individual use cases, but use cases are super important for all of us in the management team to really understand what we can learn from as we go through this. And so, yeah, so we're investing capital in this. We're adding talent. But this is quite an important initiative for us that we think will go on for many years because I personally think we're in the early innings of the impact data science can have across all businesses. It's probably going to take longer than people thought originally, but some pretty exciting things to do.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bart Dersky with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Great, thanks. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask around the insurance solution business. AUM is ticking at around $86, $87 billion. That's flat year-to-date, but it will get a boost later this year from the Unum deal. So maybe just stepping back, how we should think about growth of that insurance solutions AUM over the near term beyond the Unum deal. Thanks.

Sure. So the flow business has been good. The block business went through a period of time where it was a little quieter, but the pipeline remains good. There was a point in time where the market sort of almost felt ultra-competitive. It's still competitive, but the team is doing an excellent job in sourcing opportunities where they think they can add the most value. And so I think you're going to see continued growth, but because the pipelines feel good and the team's very focused, But I wouldn't point to say, okay, X is going to happen over the next six months or a year because the business really is transaction point to transaction point. But they've been able to create really solid value consistently. And their brand as a partner, as a food partner, is pretty exceptional around the world.

Great. Thanks for the color.

Thank you. I would now like to hand the call back over to Daniel Harris for closing remarks.

Thank you everyone for your time this morning. Should you have any follow-ups, please contact Investor Relations. We're happy to take your questions and enjoy the end of the summer. We'll look forward to talking to you next quarter.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.