Franklin Resources, Inc.

Welcome to Franklin Resources Earnings Conference Call for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026. Hello, my name is Nicole and I will be your call operator today. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and at this time all participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Celine Oh, Head of Investor Relations for Franklin Resources. You may begin.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today to discuss our quarterly results. Statements made on this conference call regarding Franklin Resources, Inc., which are not historical facts or forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These and other risks, uncertainties, and other important factors are just described in more detail in Franklin's recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the risk factors and the MD&A sections of Franklin's most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filings. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Jenny Johnson, our Chief Executive Officer. Thank you, Celine.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review Franklin Templeton's second fiscal quarter results. I'm joined by Matt Nichols, Co-President and CFO, and Daniel Gamba, Co-President and Chief Commercial Officer. We'll take your questions shortly, but first I'll highlight key results and themes shaping our business. This was an excellent quarter for Franklin Templeton, with $16.9 billion in long-term net inflows across public and private markets, reflecting the strength and breadth of our diversified global platform. We delivered record gross sales and generated positive long-term net flows in every region, reflecting sustained client demand and strong local engagement. Importantly, each of our key growth drivers, private markets, retail, SMAs and Canvas, which is our customization platform, ETFs and solutions contributed meaningfully to these results. This quarter is a clear example of the power of our multi-year strategy in action. We are ahead of our five-year plan and remain focused on delivering strong investment outcomes, deepening client relationships, and continuing to evolve our capabilities to drive sustainable long-term growth for our clients and shareholders. In my travels meeting clients around the world, one message is consistent. Our clients look to Franklin Templeton as their trusted partner for what's ahead. One firm offering the reach and resilience of a global platform together with the distinct expertise of our investment groups. As client expectations continue to evolve and more asset owners seek multifaceted partnerships with fewer firms that can deliver across asset classes, styles and regions, we believe our business is well suited to meet that demand. We are seeing a clear structural shift in how clients allocate capital and choose partners, including increased demand for vehicles such as active ETFs, customization and tax managed solutions. Clients are prioritizing firms that can deliver across public and private markets, offer global consistency in how they invest and operate, and bring together capabilities into comprehensive, outcome-oriented solutions. This is not a short-term reaction to market conditions. It reflects a more fundamental change in expectations where scale, breadth of capabilities, and the ability to deliver them in an integrated way are increasingly defining competitive advantage. Against this backdrop, we remain focused on executing as one Franklin Templeton. This means bringing together our strengths as investment specialists, innovation drivers, thought leaders, and strategic partners seamlessly in every client interaction. To that end, we continue to simplify our go-to-market approach to better serve clients and capture opportunities across the business. Ultimately, our strategy is centered on helping clients achieve better outcomes by staying focused on performance, solutions and partnership. We are continuing to build a business that is more resilient, more relevant and positioned to deliver long-term value for our clients and shareholders. Now, turning to our results, this quarter marks another step forward in the successful execution of our strategy and reflects the growth potential of our business. We delivered another consecutive quarter of positive long-term net flows of $16.9 billion. driven by multiple diversified investment groups with continued progress across our key areas of investment and growth. This momentum is reflected in long-term inflows of $118 billion, up 28% quarter over quarter, and 38% over the prior year quarter, excluding reinvested distributions. Gross sales increased across all asset classes, highlighting the strength of our global distribution platform and the progress we are making across the business. Looking ahead, our institutional pipeline of one but unfunded mandates remained strong at $20.2 billion, consistent with the prior quarter, supported by steady funding rates and ongoing replenishment from new wins. Our assets under management of 1.68 trillion remains well diversified across asset classes, client segments, regions, and investment groups. Public markets continue to be a core strength and an important driver of growth. Multi-asset AUM stands at 207 billion and generated 9.5 billion in positive net flows, marking our 19th consecutive quarter of positive flows in that asset class. These results reflect growing client demand for outcome-oriented, comprehensive solutions that span public and private markets. Across equities, net outflows were 4.7 billion. Investor activity remained selective, and we saw positive net flows across large-cap value and core, systematic, and single-country ETFs, infrastructure, and sector strategies. In fixed income, net outflows were approximately 300 million during the quarter. However, excluding Western, fixed income flows were positive 3.6 billion, marking a ninth consecutive quarter of positive long-term net flows. Momentum continued in multi-sector munis, stable value, and global fixed income strategies. Turning to alternatives, Franklin Templeton is a leading manager of alternative assets with $283 billion in alternative AUM. Our breadth and scale continue to position us as a partner of choice for clients seeking differentiated sources of return and access to private markets. We fundraise 14.3 billion in alternatives this quarter, including 13.2 billion in private market assets, which was diversified across alternative credit, secondary private equity, real estate and venture strategies. Fiscal year to date fundraising in private markets reached 22.7 billion. already in line with full year 2025 levels and positioning us to exceed our 25 to 30 billion annual fundraising target, which was already adjusted upward at the start of our fiscal year. Within alternatives, private credit continues to be an area of focus. While market attention has increased, the opportunity remains highly differentiated across strategies and risk profiles. Our alternative credit capabilities in the US and Europe are focused on the middle market with a disciplined approach to underwriting and credit selection and include diversified portfolios that have less than 10% exposure to software. Alternative credit represents 96 billion in AUM and was a significant contributor to fundraising this quarter. Looking across our broader alternatives platform, we continue to see strong momentum in secondary private equity, where investors are increasingly focused on liquidity solutions, portfolio rebalancing, and access to high-quality assets at more attractive entry points. We are also seeing a pickup in demand for private real estate, including in the wealth channel, as investors position for opportunities emerging from the current market environment. Franklin Templeton's private markets 8 billion core evergreen products spanning secondary private equity, real estate equity and debt, and private credit continue to gain traction. These products had positive net flows contributing approximately $1 billion to fundraising in aggregate in each of the last two quarters. Across the platform, clients are increasingly engaging with us for broad and differentiated investment vehicles, and we're seeing that demand translate into sustained diversified growth. ETF AUM reached a new high of 61.6 billion, a 67% increase from last year, with 4.5 billion of net inflows, our 18th consecutive quarter of positive flows. Active ETFs now represent 45% of ETF AUM, further extending our active management strategies into new vehicles. This is evident in areas such as the conversion of 10 of our muni funds into ETFs in Q1, which generated over $600 million in positive net flows this quarter, or the success of our Putnam-focused large cap value ETF, which is close to $10 billion in AUM. Delivering personalization at scale continues to represent a compelling long-term opportunity. Advancements in technology are enabling us to extend capabilities traditionally associated with separately managed accounts more efficiently and consistently across a broader client base. A leader in retail SMAs, we managed $168.3 billion in AUM and generated $2.7 billion in net inflows during this quarter. With more than 40 years of experience, we are well positioned to deliver at scale through our breadth of capabilities along with our custom indexing platform Canvas. Canvas continues to gain momentum and reached record AUM of $22.9 billion, a 27% increase from the prior quarter, with positive net flows of $5.3 billion, reflecting strong client interest in personalization and tax efficiency. Since its acquisition in 2022, Canvas has been net flow positive in each quarter and continues to scale across all distribution channels, supported by our over 200 partners and expanding adoption across retail, RIA aggregators, and traditional RIAs. This growth underscores a broader shift in the industry where tax efficiency is becoming increasingly central to portfolio construction and the advisor-client relationship. Including Canvas, our tax-managed products now represent $110 billion in AUM. As the industry evolves, we continue to invest in areas of long-term innovation, and digital assets remain a key focus. Earlier this month, we announced plans to acquire 250 digital an active cryptocurrency investment management firm, and to launch Franklin Crypto. Alongside Franklin Templeton Digital Assets, we're bringing together crypto native expertise with Franklin Templeton's global distribution to target institutional growth. Franklin Crypto will expand Franklin Templeton's existing crypto and blockchain venture capital investment offerings and will broaden the firm's digital assets investment management platform. From a regional perspective, our growth remains globally diversified with positive net flows in all regions. Internationally, Franklin Templeton manages nearly $500 billion in assets with a positive long-term net flows of $5.5 billion in aggregate. Non-U.S. gross sales grew 29% quarter over quarter with particularly strong momentum in EMEA and APAC. As a leader in emerging markets, Franklin Templeton was appointed trustee and manager of the National Investment Fund of Uzbekistan in January 2025, supporting the country's privatization agenda and governance reforms across state-owned enterprises. Yuznif confirmed plans to proceed with a dual listing on the London and Tashkent stock exchanges, marking an important step in advancing Uzbekistan's capital markets and broader privatization strategy. This engagement reflects our role as a trusted partner to official institutions and continues to drive deeper relationships with central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and government-related entities. Now, turning to investment performance. Investment performance remains competitive, supporting both client retention and organic growth. Over half of our mutual fund and ETF AUM is outperforming its peer medium over the three and ten year periods and approximately two thirds over the one and five year periods. This strength is further supported by our municipal strategies, where 95% of AUM is outperforming its peer group over the three year period. Similarly, over half of strategy composite AUM is outperforming its benchmarks over all time periods and 71% in the 10 year. In fixed income, 83% and 82% of AUM is outperforming benchmarks over the one and five year periods, respectively reinforcing the depth and durability of our investment capabilities. Turning briefly to our financial results, adjusted operating income was $475 million, increasing 8.5% quarter over quarter and 25.8% from the prior year quarter. These results reflect the continued execution of our strategy with disciplined expense management alongside targeted investments in areas of growth and innovation, positioning the firm for sustained long-term performance. Taken together, our performance this quarter underscores the strength of our platform and the progress we are making against our multi-year strategic priorities. We are building a more diversified, higher growth business with multiple drivers of organic growth, and we're seeing that momentum continue to build, positioning us to deliver long-term value for our clients, shareholders, and employees. I want to thank our employees around the world for their continued dedication and focus on serving our clients. Their efforts are fundamental to the successful execution of our strategy and the progress we're delivering across the firm. With that, I will open the call up to your questions. Operator.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. We request that you limit yourself to one question to allow for additional participants on the call this morning. Our first question comes from Alex Blossing from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hey, Jenny. Good morning, everybody. I wanted to start with a question around private markets growth. So obviously good momentum in the quarter, $13 billion. I was hoping you could break that down by sort of key strategies as well as whether Lexington, their flagship fund, contributed to that at all. And as you look out for the rest of the year, what are likely to be some of the bigger drivers for the rest of 2026 in private markets fundraising?

Sure. Great. Thanks for the question, Alex. So as you recall, last year we had set a target out of $13 to $20 billion in the alt space to raise, and we ended up raising $22.9, I think. And this year we raised that to $25 to $30 billion. We would expect to actually be above the $30 billion. And when you look at this quarter, and I can't give you any details on Lexington's flagship funds, but I'll give you some insights in it. Our largest contributor was actually our private credit managers, but Lexington was meaningful. Lexington is in the market with their flagship fund, and they're right on track. There's demand for secondaries, but they're also in the market with other products. They're co-invest, they're middle market, which all contributed as well. There are no catch-up fees in this quarter. You'll get a specific update on Lexington's flagship fund when they, you know, do a filing probably towards the end of 26. All of our alternative managers contributed to this quarter's momentum. There are over 30 vehicles that contributed. So it's a very diverse, what we think is a strong quarter. And, you know, we felt very good about the flows across the board.

Great. Thank you. You saved me a follow-up on the catch-up piece there. I did want to ask about the comment you have in the release around just the dry powder. You give us the total EOM, $263 billion in private markets. Some of it is fee-paying, some of it is not fee-paying. So is it possible to break down the non-fee-paying piece and help us think through the timing of when that's going to come in into the fee rate and run rate?

So it obviously varies with each manager. Alex, let us get back to you with kind of what we're willing to sort of say publicly on that. So we'll give us a little bit here.

But, Alex, fee earning AUM out of our alts is about 90%, 89% approximately.

Our next question comes from Glenn Shore with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks very much. So question maybe on Canvas and tax optimization strategies. Seen a lot of growth. You commented on yours. I'm just curious. There's a lot of competition, but there's also really low penetration. So I wonder if you could talk to about what you see for further growth in terms of penetrating the current base of clients, any capacity issues you might see, and then very importantly, how you differentiate in a crowded field, meaning leveraging that brand and distribution relationship that you have.

Thanks. What I would say is, first of all, I think one of the differentiators of Canvas versus the others, it was built by quant people as opposed to tax people. It's much more about the technology, which gives it a lot more flexibility going forward. I think Canvas is being selected in many cases because people recognize that it has the really kind of an impressive technology. And when we added the managed option solution over it, it's giving us a lot more creativity around product development. So things like, you know, you have high basis concentration of stock and you can use the managed options component of it to be able to make a more tax efficient portfolio. So I think we're winning because of the actual technology you know, vehicle or not the vehicle, but the technology there. What, you know, started out as a direct indexing opportunity has evolved into an ability to take that technology as an overlay and create tax managed, tax efficient over active strategies. And so our conversations are now not just do you want this as a platform to manage separately managed accounts or, you know, direct indexing, but we'd love to use it as a way to optimize the tax efficiency of our active strategies. And so they're open up to a lot of partner conversations. I don't know, Daniel, you want to add some things to that?

Yeah, so I will add two aspects to the success we're having actually on the tax alpha and tax optimization space. which is one space that's really growing very, very fast for the industry. And we're absolutely capitalizing on that. I'll say number one, clearly our retail SMA presence being so big at close to $170 billion makes us very uniquely positioned, including, of course, the legacy business that we have on the SMA side. And on the Canvas side, there's two elements to highlight. One, is the tax optimization that we do is quite unique and differentiated because we do receive in-kind positions from clients. We do that, and we're very flexible in how we do the optimization, and clients are absolutely looking at that. And the other part is we add a lot of simplicity, and we're very innovating. Canvas includes, as Jenny mentioned, not only direct indexing, but we also have risk factor overlays. We have options for income within the same platform. And we have added now fundamental third-party manager tax optimization, including for our different fundamental managers. We're adding that. On top of that, we're adding long-short. So long-short has already been built into that. We have 130-30, 140-40, all in the same platform. And finally, we also are adding, and we actually added already, municipal bond ladders in the same platform. So the simplicity is giving us substantial momentum to the degree that it's actually grown at 72% CAGR, and it's grown actually 10 times since acquisition at $23 billion. So I think the momentum will continue. The AUM doubled over the past 12 months, and we expect that to continue, given how differentiated the platform is.

All right. Thanks for all that, Jamie and Daniel. Appreciate it.

And our next question comes from Dan Fannin with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Thanks. Good morning. So Matt, just wanted to follow up on the guidance that you gave. There's been some change from last quarter, but you also echoed, reiterated things you've been saying around flat with fiscal years 24 and 25. So I wanted to just get some clarification around the moving parts. And then also in the quarter, there was an announcement of some voluntary retirements across the equity portfolio or equity division and I assume that's incorporated in this guidance and maybe the outlook for next year, but just wondering if that's incremental or not.

Yes, the voluntary buyout is included in our full year projection. When I go through the quarter guidance and then I'll talk about the annual as part of that. So on the third quarter guide for our effective fee rate, we're guiding mid to high 37s, so very consistent, stable with the second quarter. Compensation, we're guiding at $830 million, assuming a $50 million performance fee at a 55% payout. IS&T is $155 million, which is in line maybe a little bit higher than last quarter based on AI investments specifically. Occupancy, we're at $70 million. In the guide in G&A, we expect to be a little bit higher at $210 to $215 million, but this does include elevated fundraising-related fees or expenses around $23 to $25 million and an additional $9 to $10 million for advertising and marketing. In terms of the full year, as outlined on page 14 that you referred to in the IR deck, this does assume... flat markets from now and excludes performance fees. We continue to guide approximately in line or slightly above, slightly above fiscal year 25 expenses, excluding performance fees. This assumes current market levels, higher sales and fundraising that we've presented today and seen, and stronger performance. Stronger performance meaning we have some compensation related expenses tied to better performance as formulaic driven. So that's going up a little bit. But for further perspective, we end up at the level illustrated on the page, which is about 1.5% higher versus 2025. We would expect investment management fee revenue to increase at four times that rate at least, meaning if expenses increase by 1.5%, we would expect investment management fee revenue would be expected to increase by at least 6% year over year, all else remaining equal. And this is consistent with previous commentary on margin expansion going into our fiscal year end that would result in fiscal fourth quarter margin in the high 29s and for the year in the 27s for the full year, both representing meaningful margin expansion ahead of plan and on our way to 30% plus margins later in all ahead of planning as presented last quarter.

Thank you.

Our next question is from Patrick DeVitt with Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. There's been a lot of press focus on secondaries, PE strategies, and the policy of marking up deals immediately upon close. Much of that has been focused on other companies, but could you give us more color on how much of Lexington's fund performance is driven by that initial markup versus natural appreciation? And then more broadly, do you see this increased attention or the increased attention on this practice impacting regulatory scrutiny or demand for the asset class? Thank you.

So the issue that happened there was actually because I think that the manager kind of changed the policy and maybe was a little unclear in how that sort of went down. I think that created a huge amount of noise. Here's what traditionally in secondaries, the markup, the discount markup is about 20% to 25% of total return over the life of a fund. So that gives you a sense for most of the appreciation really comes in the asset itself. And that's the beauty, I think, of somebody like a Lexington who's got is a premier buyer of these deals. They get to be pretty selective as far as what deals they choose, and they have a ton of information. I mean, they have information on 55,000 private companies, and so they're really tracking and they're getting to decide which underlying funds they believe are going to have the best upside opportunity, and that's how they're really underwriting it, and then they obviously negotiate a discount. So that gives you kind of a sense.

The next question comes from Michael Cypress with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about AI. I was hoping you could update us on how you're using AI across the organization today and some of the use cases that have been most impactful so far and some of the key learnings that you've had. And if you're able to help quantify any of the benefits that you're seeing, that would be interesting. And as you look at over the next couple of years, can you talk about some of the steps that you're taking to further embed AI throughout the organization? I know, Matt, you mentioned some uplift on expenses in part from AI investments. Maybe you could elaborate on some of those investments and how you're thinking about the longer-term benefits. Thank you.

Yeah, so we look at AI. Look, having run technology, I don't think that there are many companies that they can sit there and say that the AI has yet to be material in their organization, and everybody's doing a ton of stuff in it. I'm proud of the work that we've done because we were early adopters in what is this multi-agent orchestration of AI, and that was the intelligence hub, what we call intelligence hub, which was our platform used for distribution. The way, if I were to bucket the AI efforts, I would say with respect to distribution and investments, it's all about growth opportunities with respect to operations and technology. Operations, it's about growth. efficiencies, and in technologies, it ultimately will be about getting more through the pipeline. So with this multi-agent intelligence hub, we'll start there. This is the one that we announced the partnership with Microsoft, and they came in and helped us build it. And I say it's a very simple problem with a complex technical solution. The simple problem is how do you ensure that your salespeople are seeing the right clients and having the best conversations? That goes in and it pulls data from your CRM system, from your product system, external product systems, maybe social media. Those are multiple agents, and LLM models tend not to be great with analytics, so you have to marry them with others. We are seeing early on uplift of our wholesalers or, you know, our salespeople essentially seeing 10% more clients. I'm not going to share sort of the preliminary numbers. It's too early to sort of dictate whether that's translated directly into additional sales or but from just the efficiency of the administration, and it is looking like we are also getting an uplift in sales from those, and we're rolling that out more broadly. Our investment teams are using it a little bit, you know, depending on the team, but we have hackathons done by our investment teams. They create agents. Those agents are put in a central library. We've been doing this for quite a while. I can't remember the number that we have. And so another investment team may, you know, decide, oh, I'm going to pull this agent out We also created a virtual research analyst that sits in one of our investment teams where they have fed in kind of the views and the philosophy. And it will question. It will come up with investment ideas. And it will actually, you know, if you're thinking about making an idea, it will question, like, have you thought about these things? You say these are important. And it's done a review of historical trades. And we have multiple different ways in which our investment teams are leveraging it and learning from it. And the most important thing, I think, is we've created this centralized group to share expertise on AI so they get the learnings from each other. We have work – you know, this is something we're focused on to the extent that we've outsourced is looking at the value.

Welcome to Franklin Resources Earnings Conference Call for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026. Hello, my name is Nicole and I will be your call operator today. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and at this time all participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Celine Oh, Head of Investor Relations for Franklin Resources. You may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our quarterly results. Statements made on this conference call regarding Franklin Resources, Inc., which are not historical facts or forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These and other risks, uncertainties, and other important factors are just described in more detail in Franklin's recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the risk factors and the MD&A sections of Franklin's most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filings. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Jenny Johnson, our Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Celine. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review Franklin Templeton's second fiscal quarter results. I'm joined by Matt Nichols, co-president and CFO, and Daniel Gamba, co-president and chief commercial officer. We'll take your questions shortly, but first I'll highlight key results and themes shaping our business. This was an excellent quarter for Franklin Templeton, with $16.9 billion in long-term net inflows across public and private markets, reflecting the strength and breadth of our diversified global platform. We delivered record gross sales and generated positive long-term net flows in every region, reflecting sustained client demand and strong local engagement. Importantly, each of our key growth drivers, private markets, retail SMAs and Canvas, which is our customization platform, ETFs and solutions contributed meaningfully to these results. This quarter is a clear example of the power of our multi-year strategy in action. We are ahead of our five-year plan and remain focused on delivering strong investment outcomes, deepening client relationships, and continuing to evolve our capabilities to drive sustainable long-term growth for our clients and shareholders. In my travels meeting clients around the world, one message is consistent. Our clients look to Franklin Templeton as their trusted partner for what's ahead. One firm offering the reach and resilience of a global platform together with the distinct expertise of our investment groups. As client expectations continue to evolve and more asset owners seek multifaceted partnerships with fewer firms that can deliver across asset classes, styles, and regions, we believe our business is well suited to meet that demand. We are seeing a clear structural shift in how clients allocate capital and choose partners, including increased demand for vehicles such as active ETFs, customization, and tax-managed solutions. Clients are prioritizing firms that can deliver across public and private markets, offer global consistency in how they invest and operate, and bring together capabilities into comprehensive, outcome-oriented solutions. This is not a short-term reaction to market conditions. It reflects a more fundamental change in expectations where scale, breadth of capabilities, and the ability to deliver them in an integrated way are increasingly defining competitive advantage. Against this backdrop, we remain focused on executing as one Franklin Templeton. This means bringing together our strengths as investment specialists, innovation drivers, thought leaders, and strategic partners seamlessly in every client interaction. To that end, we continue to simplify our go-to-market approach to better serve clients and capture opportunities across the business. Ultimately, our strategy is centered on helping clients achieve better outcomes by staying focused on performance, solutions and partnership. We are continuing to build a business that is more resilient, more relevant and positioned to deliver long-term value for our clients and shareholders. Now turning to our results, this quarter marks another step forward in the successful execution of our strategy and reflects the growth potential of our business. We delivered another consecutive quarter of positive long-term net flows of $16.9 billion. driven by multiple diversified investment groups with continued progress across our key areas of investment and growth. This momentum is reflected in long-term inflows of $118 billion, up 28% quarter over quarter, and 38% over the prior year quarter, excluding reinvested distributions. Gross sales increased across all asset classes, highlighting the strength of our global distribution platform and the progress we are making across the business. Looking ahead, our institutional pipeline of one but unfunded mandates remained strong at $20.2 billion, consistent with the prior quarter, supported by steady funding rates and ongoing replenishment from new wins. Our assets under management of 1.68 trillion remains well diversified across asset classes, client segments, regions, and investment groups. Public markets continue to be a core strength and an important driver of growth. Multi-asset AUM stands at 207 billion and generated 9.5 billion in positive net flows, marking our 19th consecutive quarter of positive flows in that asset class. These results reflect growing client demand for outcome-oriented, comprehensive solutions that span public and private markets. Across equities, net outflows were 4.7 billion. Investor activity remained selective, and we saw positive net flows across large-cap value and core, systematic, and single-country ETFs, infrastructure, and sector strategies. In fixed income, net outflows were approximately 300 million during the quarter. However, excluding Western, fixed income flows were positive 3.6 billion, marking a ninth consecutive quarter of positive long-term net flows. Momentum continued in multi-sector munis, stable value, and global fixed income strategies. Turning to alternatives, Franklin Templeton is a leading manager of alternative assets with $283 billion in alternative AUM. Our breadth and scale continue to position us as a partner of choice for clients seeking differentiated sources of return and access to private markets. We fundraise 14.3 billion in alternatives this quarter, including 13.2 billion in private market assets, which was diversified across alternative credit, secondary private equity, real estate and venture strategies. Fiscal year to date fundraising in private markets reached 22.7 billion. already in line with full year 2025 levels and positioning us to exceed our 25 to 30 billion annual fundraising target which was already adjusted upward at the start of our fiscal year within alternatives private credit continues to be an area of focus while market attention is increased the opportunity remains highly differentiated across strategies and risk profiles Our alternative credit capabilities in the US and Europe are focused on the middle market with a disciplined approach to underwriting and credit selection and include diversified portfolios that have less than 10% exposure to software. Alternative credit represents 96 billion in AUM and was a significant contributor to fundraising this quarter. Looking across our broader alternatives platform, we continue to see strong momentum in secondary private equity, where investors are increasingly focused on liquidity solutions, portfolio rebalancing, and access to high quality assets at more attractive entry points. We are also seeing a pickup in demand for private real estate, including in the wealth channel as investors position for opportunities emerging from the current market environment. Franklin Templeton's private markets, eight billion core evergreen products spanning secondary private equity, real estate equity and debt and private credit continue to gain traction. These products had positive net flows contributing approximately $1 billion to fundraising in aggregate in each of the last two quarters. Across the platform, clients are increasingly engaging with us for broad and differentiated investment vehicles, and we're seeing that demand translate into sustained diversified growth. ETF AUM reached a new high of 61.6 billion, a 67% increase from last year, with 4.5 billion of net inflows, our 18th consecutive quarter of positive flows. Active ETFs now represent 45% of ETF AUM, further extending our active management strategies into new vehicles. This is evident in areas such as the conversion of 10 of our muni funds into ETFs in Q1, which generated over $600 million in positive net flows this quarter, or the success of our Putnam-focused large-cap value ETF, which is close to $10 billion in AUM. Delivering personalization at scale continues to represent a compelling long-term opportunity. Advancements in technology are enabling us to extend capabilities traditionally associated with separately managed accounts more efficiently and consistently across a broader client base. A leader in retail SMAs, we managed $168.3 billion in AUM and generated $2.7 billion in net inflows during this quarter. With more than 40 years of experience, we are well positioned to deliver at scale through our breadth of capabilities, along with our custom indexing platform, Canvas. Canvas continues to gain momentum and reached record AUM of $22.9 billion, a 27% increase from the prior quarter, with positive net flows of $5.3 billion, reflecting strong client interest in personalization and tax efficiency. Since its acquisition in 2022, Canvas has been net flow positive in each quarter and continues to scale across all distribution channels, supported by our over 200 partners and expanding adoption across retail, RIA aggregators, and traditional RIAs. This growth underscores a broader shift in the industry where tax efficiency is becoming increasingly central to portfolio construction and the advisor-client relationship. Including Canvas, our tax-managed products now represent $110 billion in AUM. As the industry evolves, we continue to invest in areas of long-term innovation, and digital assets remain a key focus. Earlier this month, we announced plans to acquire 250 digital an active cryptocurrency investment management firm, and to launch Franklin Crypto. Alongside Franklin Templeton Digital Assets, we're bringing together crypto native expertise with Franklin Templeton's global distribution to target institutional growth. Franklin Crypto will expand Franklin Templeton's existing crypto and blockchain venture capital investment offerings and will broaden the firm's digital assets investment management platform. From a regional perspective, our growth remains globally diversified with positive net flows in all regions. Internationally, Franklin Templeton manages nearly $500 billion in assets, with a positive long-term net flows of $5.5 billion in aggregate. Non-U.S. gross sales grew 29% quarter over quarter, with particularly strong momentum in EMEA and APAC. As a leader in emerging markets, Franklin Templeton was appointed trustee and manager of the National Investment Fund of Uzbekistan in January 2025, supporting the country's privatization agenda and governance reforms across state-owned enterprises. Yuznif confirmed plans to proceed with a dual listing on the London and Tashkent stock exchanges, marking an important step in advancing Uzbekistan's capital markets and broader privatization strategy. This engagement reflects our role as a trusted partner to official institutions and continues to drive deeper relationships with central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and government-related entities. Now, turning to investment performance. Investment performance remains competitive, supporting both client retention and organic growth. Over half of our mutual fund and ETF AUM is outperforming its peer medium over the three and 10 year periods and approximately two thirds over the one and five year periods. This strength is further supported by our municipal strategies, where 95% of AUM is outperforming its peer group over the three year period. Similarly, over half of strategy composite AUM is outperforming its benchmarks over all time periods and 71% in the 10 year. In fixed income, 83% and 82% of AUM is outperforming benchmarks over the one and five year periods, respectively reinforcing the depth and durability of our investment capabilities. Turning briefly to our financial results, adjusted operating income was $475 million, increasing 8.5% quarter over quarter and 25.8% from the prior year quarter. These results reflect the continued execution of our strategy with disciplined expense management alongside targeted investments in areas of growth and innovation, positioning the firm for sustained long-term performance. Taken together, our performance this quarter underscores the strength of our platform and the progress we are making against our multi-year strategic priorities. We are building a more diversified, higher growth business with multiple drivers of organic growth, and we're seeing that momentum continue to build, positioning us to deliver long-term value for our clients, shareholders, and employees. I want to thank our employees around the world for their continued dedication and focus on serving our clients. Their efforts are fundamental to the successful execution of our strategy and the progress we're delivering across the firm. With that, I will open the call up to your questions. Operator?

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. We request that you limit yourself to one question to allow for additional participants on the call this morning. Our first question comes from Alex from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hey, Jenny. Good morning, everybody. I wanted to start with a question around private markets growth. So obviously good momentum. in the quarter, $13 billion. I was hoping you could break that down by sort of key strategies, as well as whether Lexington, their flagship fund, contributed to that at all. And as you look out for the rest of the year, what are likely to be some of the bigger drivers for the rest of 2026 in private markets fundraising?

Sure. Great. Thanks for the question, Alex. So as you recall, last year, we had set a target out of $13 to $20 billion in in the old space to raise, and we ended up raising 22.9, I think. And this year, we raised that to 25 to 30 billion. We would expect to actually be above the 30 billion. And when you look at this quarter, and I can't give you any details on Lexington's flagship funds, but I'll give you some insights in it. Our largest contributor was actually our private credit managers. But Lexington was meaningful. Lexington is in the market with their flagship fund, and they're right on track. There's demand for secondaries, but they're also in the market with other products. They're co-invest, they're middle market, which all contributed as well. There are no catch-up fees in this quarter. you'll get a specific update on Lexington's flagship fund when they, you know, do a filing probably towards the end of 26. All of our alternative managers contributed to this quarter's momentum. There are over 30 vehicles that contributed. So it's a very diverse, what we think is a strong quarter. And, you know, we felt very good about the flows across the board.

Great. Thank you. You saved me a follow up on the catch up piece there. I did want to ask about the comment you have in the release around just the dry powder. You give us the total UM 263 billion in private markets. Some of this fee paying, some of it is not fee paying. So is it possible to break down like the non fee paying piece and help us think through the timing of when that's going to come in into the fee rate and run rate?

So it obviously varies with each manager. Alex, let us get back to you with kind of what we're willing to sort of say publicly on that. So we'll give us a little bit here.

But, Alex, fee earning AUM out of our office is about 90%, 89% approximately.

Our next question comes from Glenn Shore with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks very much. So question maybe on Canvas and tax optimization strategies. Seen a lot of growth. You commented on yours. I'm just curious with there's a lot of competition, but there's also really low penetration. So I wonder if you could talk to about what you see for further growth in terms of penetrating the current base of clients, any capacity issues you might see, and then very importantly, how you differentiate in a crowded field, meaning leveraging that brand and distribution relationship that you have.

Thanks. What I would say is, first of all, I think one of the differentiators of Canvas versus the others, it was built by quant people as opposed to tax people. It's much more about the technology, which gives it a lot more flexibility going forward. I think Canvas is being selected in many cases because people recognize that it has the really kind of an impressive technology. And when we added the managed option solution over it, it's giving us a lot more creativity around product development. So things like, you know, you have high basis concentration of stock and you can use the managed options component of it to be able to make a more tax-efficient portfolio. So I think we're winning because of the actual – you know, vehicle or not the vehicle, but the technology there. What, you know, started out as a direct indexing opportunity has evolved into an ability to take that technology as an overlay and create tax-managed, tax-efficient over active strategies. And so our conversations are now not just do you want this as a platform to manage separately managed accounts or, you know, direct indexing, we'd love to use it as a way to optimize the tax efficiency of our active strategies. And so they open up to a lot of partner conversations. I don't know, Daniel, you want to add some things to that?

Yeah, so I will add two aspects to the success we're having actually on the tax alpha and tax optimization space. which is one space that's really growing very, very fast for the industry. And we're absolutely capitalizing on that. I'll say number one, clearly our retail SMA presence being so big at close to $170 billion makes us very uniquely positioned, including, of course, the legacy business that we have on the SMA side. And on the Canva side, there's two elements to highlight. One, is the tax optimization that we do is quite unique and differentiated because we do receive in-kind positions from clients. We do that and we're very flexible in how we do the optimization and clients are absolutely looking at that. And the other part is we add a lot of simplicity and we're very innovating. Canvas includes, as Jenny mentioned, not only direct indexing, but we also have risk factor overlays. We have options for income within the same platform. And we have added now fundamental third-party manager tax optimization, including for our different fundamental managers. We're adding that. On top of that, we're adding long-short. So long-short has already been built into that. We have 130-30, 140-40, all in the same platform. And finally, we also are adding, and we actually added already, municipal bond ladders in the same platform. So the simplicity is giving us substantial momentum to the degree that it's actually grown at 72% CAGR, and it's grown actually 10 times since acquisition at $23 billion. So I think the momentum will continue. The AUM doubled over the past 12 months, and we expect that to continue, given how differentiated the platform is.

All right. Thanks for all that, Jamie and Daniel. Appreciate it.

And our next question comes from Dan Fannin with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Thanks. Good morning. So Matt, just wanted to follow up on the guidance that you gave. There's been some change from last quarter, but you also echoed, reiterated things you've been saying around flat with fiscal years 24 and 25. So I wanted to just get some clarification around the moving parts. And then also in the quarter, there was an announcement of some voluntary retirements across the equity portfolio or equity division requirements. I assume that's incorporated in this guidance and maybe the outlook for next year, but just wondering if that's incremental or not.

Yes, the voluntary buyout is included in our full-year projection. First of all, when I go through the quarter guidance, and then I'll talk about the annual as part of that. So on the third quarter guide for our effective fee rate, we're guiding mid to high 37s, so very consistent, stable with the second quarter. Compensation, we're guiding at $830 million, assuming a $50 million performance fee at a 55% payout. IS&T is $155 million, which is in line maybe a little bit higher than last quarter based on AI investments specifically. Occupancy, we're at $70 million. In the guide in G&A, we expect to be a little bit higher at $210 to $215 million, but this does include elevated fundraising-related fees or expenses around $23 to $25 million and an additional $9 to $10 million for advertising and marketing. In terms of the full year, as outlined on page 14 that you referred to in the IR deck, this does assume... flat markets from now and excludes performance fees. We continue to guide approximately in line or slightly above, slightly above fiscal year 25 expenses, excluding performance fees. This assumes current market levels, higher sales and fundraising that we've presented today and seen, and stronger performance. Stronger performance meaning we have some compensation related expenses tied to better performance as formulaic driven. So that's going up a little bit. But for further perspective, we end up at the level illustrated on the page, which is about 1.5% higher versus 2025. We would expect investment management fee revenue to increase at four times that rate at least, meaning if expenses increased by 1.5%, we would expect investment management fee revenue would be expected to increase by at least 6% year over year, all else remaining equal. And this is consistent with previous commentary on margin expansion going into our fiscal year end that would result in fiscal fourth quarter margin in the high 29s and for the year in the 27s for the full year, both representing meaningful margin expansion ahead of plan and on our way to 30% plus margins later in All ahead of planning as presented last quarter.

Thank you.

Our next question is from Patrick David with Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. There's been a lot of press focus on secondaries, PE strategies, and the policy of marking up deals immediately upon close. Much of that has been focused on other companies, but could you give us more color on how much of Lexington's fund performance is driven by that initial markup versus natural appreciation? And then more broadly, do you see this increased attention or the increased attention on this practice impacting regulatory scrutiny or demand for the asset class? Thank you.

So the issue that happened there was actually because I think that the manager kind of changed the policy and maybe was a little unclear in how that sort of went down. I think that created a huge amount of noise. Here's what traditionally in secondaries, the markup, the discount markup is about 20% to 25% of total return over the life of a fund. So that gives you a sense for most of the appreciation really comes in the asset itself And that's the beauty, I think, of somebody like a Lexington who's got, you know, is a premier buyer of these deals. They get to be pretty selective as far as what deals they choose. And they have a ton of information. I mean, they have information on 55,000 private companies. And so they're really tracking and they're getting to decide which, you know, which underlying funds they believe are going to have the best upside opportunity. And that's how they're really underwriting it. And then they obviously negotiate a discount. So that gives you kind of a sense.

The next question comes from Michael Cypress with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about AI. I was hoping you could update us on how you're using AI across the organization today and some of the use cases that have been most impactful so far and some of the key learnings that you've had. And if you're able to help quantify any of the benefits that you're seeing, that would be interesting. And as you look out over the next couple of years, can you talk about some of the steps that you're taking to further embed AI throughout the organization? I know, Matt, you mentioned some uplift on expenses in part from AI investments. Maybe you could elaborate on some of those investments and how you're thinking about the longer-term benefits.

Thank you. Yeah, so we look at AI. Look, having run technology, I don't think that there are many companies that they can sit there and say that the AI has yet to be material in their organization, and everybody's doing a ton of stuff in it. I'm proud of the work that we've done because we were early adopters in what is this multi-agent orchestration of AI, and that was the intelligence hub, what we call intelligence hub, which was our platform used for distribution. The way, if I were to bucket the AI efforts, I would say with respect to distribution and investments, it's all about growth opportunities with respect to operations and technology, or operations, it's about growth. efficiencies. And in technologies, it ultimately will be about getting more through the pipeline. So with this multi-agent intelligence hub, we'll start there. This is the one that we announced the partnership with Microsoft, and they came in and helped us build it. And I say it's a very simple problem with a complex technical solution. The simple problem is, how do you ensure that your salespeople are seeing the right clients and having the best conversations? That goes in and it pulls data from your CRM system, from your product system, external product systems, maybe social media. Those are multiple agents, and LLM models tend not to be great with analytics, so you have to marry them with others. We are seeing early on uplift of our wholesalers or our salespeople essentially seeing 10% more clients. I'm not going to share sort of the preliminary numbers. It's too early to sort of dictate whether that's translated directly into additional sales or but from just the efficiency of the administration. And it is looking like we are also getting an uplift in sales from those. And we're rolling that out more broadly. Our investment teams are using it a little bit, you know, depending on the team. But we have hackathons done by our investment teams. They create agents. Those agents are put in a central library. We've been doing this for quite a while. I can't remember the number that we have. And so another investment team may, you know, decide, oh, I'm going to pull this agent out We also created a virtual research analyst that sits in one of our investment teams where they have fed in kind of the views and the philosophy, and it will question. It will come up with investment ideas, and it will actually, you know, if you're thinking about making an idea, it will question, like, have you thought about these things? You say these are important, and it's done a review of historical trades. And we have multiple different ways in which our investment teams are leveraging it and learning from it. And the most important thing I think is we've created this centralized group to share expertise on AI so they get the learnings from each other. We have work, you know, this is something we're focused on to the extent that we've outsourced is looking at the length of our outsource deals because we don't want just to have the AI efficiencies accrued to the outsource deal. So that's a part of our vendor management program. And then in places that we have the operations in-house, reconciliation, other things, RFPs, we are seeing some efficiencies. It's still very early. And we're measuring in our technology group, for example, you know, how much code is being written by AI. So that gives you kind of a feel for how we're using it across the firm.

Yeah, in terms of how we're spending money, I mean, Jenny already touched on it, but to that question, you know, we have a fully staffed, dedicated team, as Jenny mentioned, that's centralized. But within that team, we have individuals focused on, as Jenny mentioned, investment, sales, functions. So that becomes a fairly significant group internally. And then each of these groups is focused on both the effectiveness piece and the efficiency piece. So there's a revenue part of this, and then there's a cost part of this. And we're doing our best. It's very early days. We're doing our best to track the dollars we spend versus the dollars that we either save or that we gain through the process of using AI and adoption.

Our next question comes from Bill Katz. with TD Cohen. Please go ahead.

Okay, thank you very much. I just have a couple of nits added together, maybe equals one full question. On the tax minimization, top tax optimization side, there's been some discussion around potential adverse tax rule for Exchange 351. It seems a bit arcane to us, but it's been coming up a lot in investor dialogue. A, how real is that as a real change, or is that more of a disclosure issue, and would that have any kind of impact on the business? My second question is just on Lexington 11. I think you previously raised $22 billion, and I know Matt just gave some guidance around some platform fees or placement fees into the new quarter or so. Is there any reason to think that that next fund won't be as equal of size? And then thirdly, just in terms of capital return, a little bit off-layer question, just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your priorities looking ahead. Thank you.

I'll just quickly just jump in on the Lexington, and then I'll turn it over to Matt on the tax stuff. So no reason to believe that that is not at the size of the last fund. As I said, you know, they are happy and on track, and there's good demand for secondaries, and we do not see any cannibalization with the evergreen funds that we've done in secondaries. So I think that, you know, that's going smoothly. Matt, do you want to cover that? I think everyone – what was the tax – 351? What was that?

Yeah, it's a bit arcane, but apparently in the index ETF world, there's some discussion between, I think, ICI and the IRS. Excuse me. Sorry, I'd be so ticky-tacky on this call. Just in terms of adverse ruling about tax optimization under the exchange, would that limit maybe the use of options and so forth as a way to shield income? A bit arcane, but it's been coming up as a watch point given the really rapid growth in tax optimization.

Here's what I would say. And I don't know specifically on that other than I am on the ICI board and we do talk a lot about, you know, the mutual funds have a sort of unequal tax treatment versus an ETF because you get to do the in-kind. I don't think, there's always a worry that that goes away. The reality is it's actually unfair. Why should your average person in a mutual fund who tends to be your smaller investor actually have to pay capital gains just because the fund experienced capital gains versus what their individual ownership is, like they would if they owned a stock. So that has always been something that has been a disadvantage a bit on mutual funds. And I think that the ICI, that's one that's always discussed. I'm not aware of discussions about the ETF losing theirs as much as the hope with the ICI that you actually make the mutual fund more fair.

I will only add that none of our major ETFs use options overlays in the way in which they are constructed. So we haven't been hit with that question given the nature of our current ETFs that we have. We do have an excellent options capability within our SMA business, which we call most and we've seen substantial demand on that. So on SMAs, clearly on individual securities, there's no such discussion. But clearly on 351 exchanges in ETFs, we are not part of those. We don't have those products structured like that.

Yeah, and actually I just looked it up on Perplexis, and I have a better understanding of what you're saying. So there are people, there are some strategies for hard net worth where people will contribute in exchanges, and we have not really participated in that. That is one. that you could and it could impact ETF share classes as part of a mutual fund. We'll see how that evolves.

Our next question comes from Brennan Hawkin with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Two questions just circling back on the ALTS fundraising. So thanks for providing the evergreen AUM which you've reached now. maybe could you talk about what sort of flows you're seeing on a quarterly basis and how we should think about that? And then just a follow-up on Lexington, you referenced that you'd be giving an update at year-end. Can you help us understand why it'd be year-end? Is that your updated expectations for the first close?

I think that on Lexington, I think that, you know, they're, like I said, they're actively fundraising. It, You know, they'll decide kind of on the timing of their first, you know, their first filing. It hasn't been year to date, so it'll be the second half or towards the end of the year.

And Jenny made that fiscal year end, now fiscal year end. So that's September. There could be an update in July or something like that, you know.

And then on the evergreen, we have said that we're raising about $200 million a month across our three. You know, we have three over a billion dollars, and we're continuing to see that same kind of demand, about $200 million a month into the three evergreen strategies.

And that's remained consistent recently with some of the, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Great.

Yeah.

Thank you. Diversity helps.

I think it's important to say that we don't have a big BDC or large exposure to software within the platform. So we've continued to raise in line or even higher across all our evergreens, secondary P, like real estate debt, real estate equity. So over the last two years, we continue to go in line with the penetration that we have on the wealth business, so substantial growth, and we haven't seen any slowdown from our end. Yeah. Thank you.

Our next question is with Ben Budish from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning and thanks for taking the question. Maybe just continuing to follow up on the ALTS fundraising. You mentioned I think earlier that most of it came from credit in the quarter, obviously not from BDCs. Can you unpack a little bit what pockets of credit you're seeing the most demand? And then just a quick housekeeping one on the G&A. You mentioned there's some sort of one-time fundraising expenses associated with, I think, the larger flagships. Just curious if we should think about those as recurring or kind of near-term elevated, but maybe not in the run rate for next year, or perhaps they come back with more flagship fundraising. Any help there would be great. Thank you.

That's the expenses. I'll get that done quickly. That's really a – I wouldn't say it's one-time because you may have other quarters that also have elevated fundraising, but – But $23 to $25 million is obviously a large number, and that would be a one-time associated with, you know, a good fundraise expectation with, you know, let's call it higher fee type alternative asset funds.

So, and on the alt fundraising, so we mentioned, remember, on the credit side, we have both BSP as well as what was formerly Alcentra, but we're calling BSP Europe. So we had good, strong fundraising for both of those. You know, part of it was CLOs, but honestly, there were probably, you know, remember, they have an opportunity fund. They have a real estate debt fund. They have special situations. So we got contributions from really across the board, and I think there's at least 15 different kind of funds that had some sort of contribution to the credit. It also, I mean, interestingly, we're seeing clarion with real estate. That's starting to pick up real estate. And Clarion has tremendous performance there. But I think as people have been nervous and we're wondering, you know, there's $20 billion in redemption requests on real estate managers out there. That money is probably going to go somewhere else. People like, sorry, on the private credit managers out there, people like real estate because it not only gives a good source of income, it has a hedge, you know, it's an inflation hedge. And so I think that's why we're seeing this pick up an interest in real estate. And then our venture group has done well, too. So, you know, I think the key message here is this was a very diversified portfolio, diversified raise as opposed to a real concentration. There are literally over 30 entities that raised money in our alt space.

And I want to point one more point, Jenny, to what you're talking about, which I think this quarter – we've had positive contribution from every single region, which is very important. And in the old fundraise, we have seen growing demand outside the U.S. with 40% coming from outside the U.S. sources, about 16% from EMEA and 23% for APAC. As an example, we successfully launched funds, new vehicles in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, with a strong momentum in Japan, which is a key market for us, and we're putting increasing resources there. And in EMEA, we're now servicing 11 markets, which is like five more markets than a year prior, given increasing demand for our LTIF across all three capabilities, including ventures. Okay, great. Thank you all very much.

And our last question comes from Ken Worthington with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. We're seeing ETF distribution fees being requested by intermediaries and being dismissed by some of the larger or largest ETF managers. How is Franklin thinking about ETFs and distribution fees? And do you see the potential for ETF access to drive market share shifts and ETFs potentially favoring Franklin?

Well, since Daniel's career started at BGI at the early days of ETFs, I'm going to let him answer this one.

Yeah, so thank you for that question. I'll say that the ETF is one of the most exciting developments that we have here in Franklin Templeton. Our platform reached $62 billion at the end of the quarter, and that's double what we have 18 months ago. Our flows, the organic growth of the flows, just the fiscal year today, which is only two quarters, 49%, and we're growing really across the board. The three main drivers for ETFs, active ETFs, the industry is talking about it, 45% of what we have. It grew 70% relative to a year ago. We just reached our focus, large-cap value ETF. PVAL is nearing $10 billion, and it's doubled in six months. and we have plans to launch every major fundamental PM with a large franchise will manage their own ETF. The other part that I think is worth mentioning is we converted 10 Muni mutual funds the last quarter, and now that's a full growth platform, and it's helping growth not only ETS but also Muni mutual funds, Muni SMAs, which is excellent. The other driver is single country and regional ETFs that represent 30% of the platform. They all had excellent inflows. And we grew over 3 billion flows into these country ETFs, including Korea, Japan, Taiwan. And given our heritage in managing local assets, we will continue to develop and launch more country and regional ETFs. And the third driver is systematic and smart data that is 20% that is managed by our Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions. We have the Franklin International Low Volatility High Dividend ETF approaching $5 billion. We will continue to do that. And clearly, we have a great track record on ETFs, and we are doubling down on that. Of course, a lot of our capabilities come from excellent relationships and partnerships with our clients. We have a U.S. wealth platform that is almost $800 billion, and it's one of the largest with hundreds of salespeople covering and educating our sales advisors. Of course, we review our business with all our platforms regularly, and as we evolve our platform and value to clients, we will prioritize our platforms that deliver the most value to us. So on the ETF discussions, we are clearly creating business plans with our partners, And those that have the most impact, investing in education, sales and support, and impact the business, will continue to be major partners, and we will continue to discuss how can we grow our business together. So clearly ETFs is one of the areas where you're going to hear much more from us going forward.

And so just to that last point that Daniel was making, look, Platforms always want to have more revenue share. That's just the reality. ETFs are not structured in the same way that mutual funds were. And platforms, depending on the platform, they can influence growth and opportunity for ETFs or not. And so if the platform is actually going to be able to have some positive influence, then that's a discussion we have to the extent that they can't influence ultimately in the end. then we wouldn't consider any of those fees.

Got it. And because some are not going to participate in or don't want to participate in the fees, do you think it drives share to shift from those that are willing to partner with distribution from those that are not?

Different platforms have different influence, right? And so If you can heavily influence, yes, there will potentially be some amount of shift on what you can influence. But the reality is the financial advisor is getting more and more independent. And to the extent that they're on one of these platforms and they're an RIA, they don't care what the platform is telling them. They're going to sell what they sell. And so it ends up being really kind of, you know, that's where having a huge workforce is so important because it's hand-to-hand combat. You know, if they choose the model from the platform – then the platform influences it. But most of the big RIAs who are big ETF users actually decide on their own.

Thank you.

Quick point of clarification from an earlier question that we wanted to just clarify. I think Alex asked a question around alternative asset versus non-fee generating. Just to be clear, the 90% that we talked about, approximately 90%, that's potential to earn fees on that. The current fee-generating AUM is about 80%, and that's on the full $283 billion.

And it varies depending on all the financial sets that are blended.

Exactly. I just wanted to make sure we clarified that.

Our next question comes from Brian Bedell with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for squeezing me in here. Actually, one on Franklin Crypto. Jenny, if you could just talk a little bit about what market are you targeting for that and the different products types as you evolve your Franklin digital assets, and then also on the tokenization of money funds, the Benji Fund, and Um, your, your view on, you know, to what extent we'll see, um, the development of tokenized money funds accelerate, um, you know, given obviously the use cases and the, you know, the, um, the, you know, the yield cases, especially within the digital asset platforms.

Yeah. Great. Um, so first of all, why do I love blockchain? Because it's a really efficient technology that, that drives down costs. So that's a good thing for us as an industry and for our clients. But you have to have a wallet to actually hold a token. A wallet is just a cryptography that matches to that token. But you just have to have it. And all of our traditional distributors, very few of them actually have a wallet. So you have to go to the exchanges. So when you ask me where's the kind of immediate opportunity, it's an exchange, a crypto exchange, a Kraken, an Ondo, a Coinbase, Binance that have wallets there. And two things are happening. One is it's an obvious place to integrate Benji, so people want to put money in a cash. If it's in their stable coin, they don't earn any yield, so they can shift it into a money market fund and earn yield on that. So that's an obvious opportunity for us. The second thing that's happening, and you just take the top five exchanges, they have a billion wallets there. So from a new client base, kind of interesting, and they're thinking about offering – traditional products there. So we have launched, I think, eight ETFs, tokenized ETFs on one of the exchanges and five on the other. And we're talking to other exchanges. So we've got eight on Kraken and five on Ondo. And these are just in case those investors are interested in more traditional products. And so you couldn't hold an ETF or a mutual fund unless it was tokenized because they have no other way of holding it. So we think that's an interesting new opportunity for us. The other thing is you saw that we're bringing a small team, 250 Digital, and they actually are, they kind of have an institutional, think of it as a crypto venture fund. And what we found is there are institutional investors who would like exposure to the space but aren't comfortable with a small firm. And so now that they're part, we think that, and they don't start until this fall, but when they start, we'll get some demand from institutional clients who are interested in investing in kind of a venture part of the crypto space.

And so the punchline, I guess, is that we should expect an acceleration of your tokenized products as you roll this out over the next few quarters, let's say?

Yeah, I mean, look, these things are always a hockey stick, right? So right now, it just depends on how much adoption, say, the tokenized ETFs get on those exchanges. We are seeing some traction where we are in programs where the Benji product is an option, and we're starting to see some traction there. But I think it takes a little time to kind of sell people and educate on the space.

Yep, yep, definitely. Yep, great. Thank you so much.

I think somebody was trying to get in earlier with a question on capital management, so why don't we just answer that if we have time. So I think the question was on our capital management priorities, so I'll stop. Maybe Jane, then you go ahead. So in capital management priorities, obviously our dividend is always top of the list in that regard, so we want to make sure the dividend is in place and continue to protect the increased dividend that we have each year. Our organic growth is taking up more capital than it has done in the past, so our C capital and co-invest balance sheet allocation has increased again to $2.9 billion, up from $2.8 billion last quarter. As I mentioned in the previous quarter, we expect that to be close to $3 billion by the time we reach the end of the year. We've always repurchased our employee-related stock grants to make sure we hedge our shares out to investors. basically zero out for the year, keep the same amount of shares outstanding. Then obviously we have opportunistic share repurchases. And then M&A is, I think you all know, it's just very, very super active. There are some areas of focus here, mostly distribution related. I'd say Jenny may want to make some additional comments on this, but distribution related, a little bit bolt-ons related to alternative assets, in particular overseas. We're quite involved in reviewing those things. I'd say most of the M&A slash sort of inorganic activity is around partnership, strategic activity in connection with distribution.

Great. I think you covered it very well, Matt.

That does conclude today's Q&A session. I would now like to hand the call back over to Jenny Johnson, Franklin's CEO, for final comments.

Well, listen, everybody, thank you for participating in the call today. And once again, we are a people business, and I want to thank all our employees for their hard work and dedication to the company, and we look forward to speaking with all of you again next quarter. Thank you.