DigitalBridge Group, Inc.

third quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Should anyone require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Severin White, Managing Director, Head of Public Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Mark Gansey, our CEO, and Tom Meroffer, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today, November 1st, 2024, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC for the year ending December 31st, 2023, and our Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC for the quarter ending September 30, 2024. With that, let's get started. And I'll turn the call over to Mark Gansey, our CEO. Mark.

Thanks, Severn. And welcome, everyone, to our third quarter 2024 business update. We appreciate you joining us on the call and look forward to answering your questions during the Q&A session. So let's get started with the first item today, financial performance. This quarter, Tidget Ridge continued to deliver peer-leading growth in fee revenues and fee-related earnings as our investment platform continues to scale. we delivered another quarter of mid-teens fee revenue growth combined with expanding margins as revenues continue to grow faster than expenses. FRE was up 42% year-on-year, and FRE margins were up 500 basis points to 34%. Persistent revenue growth and expanding margins are central to the DigitalBridge investment thesis, and we've continued to deliver here. Second, and probably the most important part of this quarter, was capital formation. we are well-positioned to exceed our $7 billion annual fundraising target, with $6.1 billion already raised to date. We'll talk a bit more about this in a minute, but it's important to note that the timing and composition of those commitments will shift some of the reoccurring FRE impact into 2025. And Tom will walk you through that and how it impacts out-in-period FRE for 2024 a little bit later in the call. Third, capital deployment. We're seeing the best opportunities to put that capital to work today. It's really simple. In this period, it's been in both our existing platforms and into new opportunities in the data center and tower verticals, putting more capital behind growth at DataBank and VerticalBridge as well as new portfolio companies like Yonder and JTower. It was an exceptionally busy quarter in deploying capital, and we're seeing really good opportunities in this market environment today. Let's start by talking about the uptick we're seeing in capital formation and how that sets us up for the end of the year. Next slide, please. So, look, the headline says it all. I'm pleased to report that we have $6.1 billion in capital formation year to date. This has been a tremendous quarter. And, again, I want to reconfirm with you, Digital Bridge is set to exceed our $7 billion capital formation target. Last quarter, we were in line with the prior year at the same point. And today, we're tracking 13% ahead of last year. And the momentum has been picking up. And as you can see, we've raised $1.9 billion in just the last 30 days alone and have less than $1 billion to go with two months left in the calendar year to exceed our budget and our targets, which we have strong conviction around. Since our last report, fundraising has been dominated by our co-investment around DataBank with the OzSuper transaction, and steady commitments to our Digital Bridge Partners III flagship strategy. We have a very surgical approach to closing out another 30 to 40 logos on a global basis through the end of the year, which positions us to meet and again exceed our $7 billion target.