Hamilton Lane Incorporated

all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and later the floor will be open for your questions. To ask a question at that time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. If you should need operator assistance, please press star zero. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to John Oh, Manager of Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Maria. Good morning and welcome to the Hamilton Lane Q4 fiscal 2021 earnings call. Today, I will be joined by Mario Giannini, CEO, Eric Hirsch, Vice Chairman, and Atul Varma, CFO. Before we discuss the quarter's results, we want to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements based on our current expectations for the business. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of these risks, Please review the risk factors included in the Hamilton Lane fiscal 2020 10K and subsequent reports we file with the SEC. We will also be referring to non-GAAP measures that we view as important in assessing the performance of our business. Reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to GAAP can be found in the earnings presentation materials made available on the shareholder section of the Hamilton Lane website. Our detailed financial results will be made available when our 10K is filed. Please note that nothing on this call represents an offer to sell or a solicitation to purchase interest in any of Hamilton Lane's products. Beginning on slide three. For the fiscal year, our management and advisory fee revenue grew by 18% while our fee-related earnings grew by 29% versus the prior year. This translated into full-year GAAP EPS of $2.81 based on $98 million of GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS of $2.73 based on $146 million of adjusted net income. Lastly, our board has approved a 12% increase to our annual fiscal dividend to $1.40 per share or $0.35 per share per quarter. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mario.

Thanks, John, and good morning. Our fiscal year has been off to a busy start. While the majority of our workforce continues to work remotely, we are beginning to see a much clearer path to a return to normal, and some of our employees outside of the U.S. are already experiencing that. We're also seeing the return of some modest travel, and the first week of May saw two of our senior colleagues visiting clients and prospects overseas. We continue to monitor each region's situation closely and are cautiously optimistic that, along with strong vaccination numbers, this positive trend continues. Moving to the highlights of the past few months. On March 3rd, our board of directors appointed Van Graves as the new independent director, which increased the size of the board to seven directors, four of whom are independent. Van is an accomplished brand and marketing executive and today leads the Brand Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. Over his lengthy career, Van has been responsible for some of the world's most important brands, including MasterCard, the U.S. Army, Lockheed Martin, and American Airlines. In addition, Van has spent much of his career focused on being an agent of change as well as a mentor. He's a board member of both 600 and Rising and the 3% Movement. Van holds degrees from Howard University, the Pratt Institute, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. As we continue to grow and scale our business globally, and as we look to continue our expansion into the retail channel, we will benefit from Van's experience and perspective. We're very excited to welcome him to our team. Next, on March 30th, we announced a strategic partnership with Russell Investments. Hamilton Lane will provide Russell's global clients with access to our industry-leading private markets investment solutions, our investment products, data-driven research, and innovative technology tools. We believe that our comprehensive private markets capabilities, together with Russell's leading outsourced CIO, OCIO solutions, will provide enhanced and integrated access to the global private markets for Russell's clients around the world. We view this partnership as mutually beneficial, bringing together two like-minded institutions who share a commitment to providing exceptional client service and strive to offer the very best tailored and customized solutions to meet clients' goals and objectives. To demonstrate our commitment to this partnership, we invested $90 million from the balance sheet in return for minority equity stake in Russell. We see this not as a quick win, but rather as taking a long-term positioning around the move to OCIO in certain parts of the market, and have thus partnered with one of the clear leaders in the space. Let me now turn to the results for the fiscal year, which were strong across the entirety of the business. Beginning on slide four. Here we highlight our total asset footprint, which we define as the sum of our AUM, assets under management, and AUA, assets under advisement. Total asset footprint for the quarter stood at approximately U.S. $719 billion and represents a 43% increase to our footprint year over year, continuing our long-term growth trend. Consistent with prior quarters, AUM growth year over year, which was $19 billion, or 28%, came from both our specialized funds and customized separate accounts, and continues to be diversified across client type, size of client, and geographic region. Our focus remains simply growing and winning across both lines of business, and we are pleased with our ongoing success. As for our AUAs, similar to what was seen with our AUM, growth year over year, which came in at approximately $197 billion, or approximately 45%, was from across client type and geographic region. While the year-over-year AUA change is relatively large from a dollar and percentage standpoint, the majority of the increase is resulting from us being engaged on a fixed fee basis to provide back office and portfolio reporting services to a number of new clients with very large existing portfolios. As we've mentioned on prior calls, AUA can fluctuate quarter to quarter for a variety of reasons, but the revenue associated with AUA does not necessarily move in lockstep with those changes due in many cases to the fixed fee nature of the business. We continue to note, however, that more AUA is a positive as it expands our database and number of relationships. Let me now turn it over to Eric.