Fiera Capital Corporation

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Fiera Capital's earnings call to discuss financial results for the third quarter of 2024. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call has been recorded. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw a question, please press star 2. Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Marie-France Gay, Senior Vice President, Treasury and Investor Relations. Ms. Gay, you may begin your conference.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Bonjour à tous. Bienvenue à l'appel de conférence de Fiera Capital pour discuter des résultats financiers du troisième trimestre de 2025. Welcome to the Fiera Capital Conference Call to discuss our financial results for the third quarter of 2024. Note that today's call will be held in English. Before we begin, I invite you to download a copy of today's presentation, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website at ir.fierrecapital.com. Also, note that comments made on today's call, including replies to certain questions, may deal with forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, that may cause actual results to differ from expectations. I would ask you to take a moment to read the forward-looking statements on page two of the presentation. On today's call, we would discuss our Q3 2024 results, starting with an update on AUM flows, followed by highlights of our public and private markets platforms, as well as our private wealth business. We will then review our financial performance. Our speakers today are Mr. Jean-Guy Desjardins, Chairman of the Board and Global CEO, and Mr. Lucas Pontillo, Executive Director and Global CFO. Also available to answer questions following the prepared remarks will be Jean-Michel, President and CIO, Public Markets, John Valentini, President and CEO, Private Markets, and Maxime Menard, President and CEO of Fiera Canada, and global private wealth. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jean Guy.

Thank you very much, Ms. Brown. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are very pleased with our results for the third quarter, which showed continued improvement in our distribution, operational, and financial performance. The shift by central banks towards easing policies created a favorable environment for global markets in the third quarter. Equity markets benefited from the soft lending narrative, with major indices hitting new highs. Fixed income markets have responded positively to the dovish shifts in monetary policy, with yield curves steepening and short-end yields falling more sharply than long-term yields. Against this favorable backdrop, We reported assets under management of $165.5 billion, which increased 4% in the quarter, reflecting rising equity and fixed income markets, along with positive net organic growth in both public markets, excluding pine stone, and private markets. Our private markets platform saw assets under management maintain its growth trend driven by new subscriptions of 400 million, supporting positive net organic growth and by market appreciation. Public markets assets under management increased by 6.3 billion, or 4.5%, as positive market impact was partly offset by net outflows of approximately 400 million, excluding pine stones. Our public markets platform saw a 5.1% increase in assets under management and reported net inflows of approximately 200 million. With respect to assets under management sub-advised by Pinestone, we saw significant moderation in outflows in the quarter, with net negative flows of 500 million related to ongoing client rebalancing. Also, it is important to note that on a year-over-year basis, assets under management in strategies sub-advised by Pintstone have remained essentially flat as favorable markets have upset outflows. I will now turn to highlights of our commercial and investment performance across our asset classes. Starting with our public markets platform, we were pleased to be awarded 500 million of gross mandates in the third quarter, primarily from Canadian and U.S. clients, investing in our fixed income mandates, along with new mandates from private wealth clients in Canada. We are also pleased to report that public markets excluding assets under management, sub-advised by Pinestone, Return to positive net organic growth in the quarter. We believe the improvement in flows, along with an increase in new mandate momentum that we have been seeing post-quarter end, are early testaments of the benefit of our regionalized distribution model. Turning to investment performance in public markets. It was a strong quarter for fixed income, with our flagship Canadian fixed income strategies all adding value. In particular, the active core strategy outperformed by more than 70 basis points, and strategic core beat its benchmark by more than 80 basis points. All three flagship strategies have outperformed their benchmark over the one, three, and five-year periods. Our global multi-sector income strategy also performed well, generating over 140 basis points of added value in the third quarter due to strong security selection as well as active duration and curve positioning. The strategy continues to outperform by over 300 basis points year-to-date. Our equity strategies had mixed relative performance in the third quarter. For Canadian strategies, it is worth noting that the TSX rose 10% in the quarter, marking only the third time this has happened in the last 14 years. Our absolute performance in equities was solid, but it was a challenging quarter to outperform. Despite this, the majority of our equity strategies continue to generate top quartile returns for investors, outpacing their benchmark by healthy margins over one, three, and five years. We were pleased with the performance of our Atlas Global Equity Strategy, which added 110 basis points of value in the third quarter, helped by security selection in the information technology and financial sectors, and no allocation to energy. Since its inception in 2017, This strategy ranks well relative to peers and has outperformed its benchmark by over 400 basis points. Lastly, despite our emerging markets strategies having a challenging quarter due to significant upswings in Chinese markets late in the third quarter, our frontier market strategy still managed to outperform its benchmark on the back of strong security selection in Vietnam and Kazakhstan. Now turning to our private market platform. Private markets delivered positive net organic growth of approximately 200 million during the quarter, after returning capital of 170 million to investors. Growth was driven by new mandates of 400 million, primarily from Canadian clients, into private credit mandates and European clients into real estate. In addition to the 400 million in new mandates in the quarter, more than 500 million was deployed, and we maintain a pipeline with 1.4 billion of commitments available for deployment into future opportunities. With respect to investment performance, our private market strategies performed really well in the quarter. Nearly all of our private credit strategies generated positive returns, benefiting from favorable lending conditions from lower interest rates and central banks signaling further rate reductions. Our infrastructure debt fund in particular posted strong results in the third quarter, and a 14% return over one year. Private equity also performed well, contributing to a one-year return of 19%. Our approach here remains focused on selective investment in mid-market high-growth sectors. Within our global agriculture and timber strategies, key partnerships have performed well and the team continues to actively pursue strategic acquisitions and exposure to new partnerships to capitalize on global market opportunities, especially in the Middle East. Our Canadian infrastructure strategy has generated very strong returns this quarter at 2.6%, showing resilience amid variable macroeconomic conditions. Lastly, In real estate, performance of the Canadian and UK strategies suggests recovery as property valuations benefit from recent interest rate cuts and improved liquidity. This improvement is most notable in the multi-residential and industrial sectors where FIERA strategies are more heavily concentrated. Now moving on to private wealth, Private wealth assets under management increased by $200 million in the third quarter to close at $14.3 billion. We secured new mandates of close to $90 million, of which approximately half was from First Nations relationships. We continue to deepen and strengthen these relationships and have seen good mandate activity in this space post-quarter. With that, I will now turn it over to Lucas for a review of our financial performance.