Earnings Call Transcript - AMG Q3 2025

Operator, Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the AMG Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Patricia Figueroa, Head of Investor Relations for AMG. Thank you. You may begin.

Patricia Figueroa, Head of Investor Relations

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today to discuss AMG's results for the third quarter of 2025. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during this call, we may make a number of forward-looking statements, which could differ from our actual results materially and AMG assumes no obligation to update these statements. Also, please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer of any products, investment vehicles, or services of any AMG affiliate. A replay of today's call will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website along with a copy of our earnings release and reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measures, including any earnings guidance provided. In addition, we have posted an updated investor presentation to our website and encourage investors to consult our site regularly for updated information. With us today to discuss the company's results for the quarter are Jay Horgen, Chief Executive Officer; Tom Wojcik, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Dava Ritchea, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jay.

Jay Horgen, CEO

Thanks, Patricia, and good morning, everyone. It has been a landmark year for AMG with record net inflows in alternative strategies and near record levels of capital deployed in growth investments across both new and existing affiliates. Our third quarter results reflect the building momentum in our business with a 17% year-over-year increase in EBITDA and a 27% growth rate in economic earnings per share. In addition, our organic growth profile continued to improve in the third quarter, driven by alternative strategies with $9 billion in firm-wide net inflows, bringing our year-to-date total net inflows to $17 billion which represents a 3% annualized organic growth rate. Through the third quarter across both organic growth and new affiliate investments, AMG has added approximately $76 billion in alternative assets under management, representing an increase of nearly 30% in our total alternative AUM. This increase includes $51 billion in net inflows into alternatives. Today, our affiliates manage $353 billion in alternative AUM contributing 55% of our EBITDA on a run rate basis and including sizable contributions from two of AMG's largest and longest-standing affiliates, Pantheon and AQR. Both firms continue to capitalize on the tailwinds in their respective areas by leveraging their scale, innovative cultures, and differentiated expertise which are collectively driving strong ongoing organic growth for AMG. These elements are continuing to have a meaningful impact on our business profile and earnings. And as you know, we expect each affiliate to be a double-digit contributor to AMG's earnings this year. Given the substantial increase in our alternative AUM, the significant growth and margin expansion at AQR and Pantheon, the positive contributions resulting from capital deployed in growth investments, and the positive impact of our ongoing allocation of capital to share repurchases, we anticipate a meaningful increase in our full-year economic earnings per share in 2026. Looking ahead, we have expanding opportunities to further invest in growth by investing in new and existing affiliates and by investing in AMG's strategic capabilities to magnify our affiliates' success. Our new investment pipeline remains strong with active ongoing dialogue with prospective affiliates operating in both private markets and liquid alternatives. Our investment model continues to resonate with the highest quality partner-owned firms seeking a strategic partner that can enhance their long-term success while also supporting their independence. And our strategic capabilities, particularly in capital formation, increasingly differentiate AMG and our dialogue with prospective affiliate partners. We recently announced a strategic collaboration, which highlights the value of AMG's capital formation capabilities in the U.S. wealth channel. Brown Brothers Harriman, a globally recognized 200-year-old firm with considerable scale, chose to strategically collaborate with AMG to develop innovative products and deliver structured and alternative credit solutions to the wealth channel, a very strong statement on AMG's value proposition. Also in the third quarter, we announced the sale of AMG's minority stake in Comvest private credit business. AMG invested in Comvest to provide a combination of growth capital and strategic capabilities that accelerated the growth of its credit franchise. We were pleased that AMG's strategic engagement ultimately resulted in a positive outcome for all stakeholders, including AMG shareholders. The significant return of capital, nearly 3x our purchase price highlights the underlying value of our affiliates managing alternative strategies. Having committed more than $1 billion across five new growth investments so far in 2025, we continue to actively expand AMG's participation in areas of secular growth. We have an excellent capital position, which was further enhanced by the significant proceeds from the sale of our interest in Comvest. Given our ample financial flexibility and our distinct competitive advantages, we have an outstanding opportunity to further increase our earnings growth by continuing to make growth investments and return capital to shareholders. Finally, it has been an extraordinary year for AMG in terms of both organic growth and new affiliate investments, laying the groundwork for accelerating EBITDA and earnings growth in 2026. As we continue to execute our strategy, building upon more than three decades of successful partnerships, we are confident in our ability to continue to generate long-term earnings growth. And with that, I'll turn it over to Tom.

Tom Wojcik, President and COO

Thank you, Jay, and good morning, everyone. AMG's activities over the course of this year illustrate our strategy in action. As we evolve our business mix more toward alternatives, our business is generating strong organic growth in both liquid alternatives and private markets. We continue to invest in both our affiliates and in AMG's own capabilities to support future growth opportunities. This year, we have entered four new investment partnerships with alternative firms squarely aligned with long-term secular growth trends. We also announced a strategic collaboration to bring structured credit products to the U.S. wealth marketplace with BBH Credit Partners highlighting the strength of AMG's capital formation capabilities. We engage strategically with our affiliates across a range of business initiatives, including new product launches, building out adjacent capabilities, and supporting two of our private markets affiliates and their sales to consolidators. Taken together, these strategic actions and many other elements of our unique model drove significant earnings growth and cash flow generation, which we have invested and will continue to invest for growth, fueling the execution of our strategy and the forward evolution of our business, while simultaneously returning capital through share repurchases and further delivering value to our shareholders. In the third quarter, AMG delivered $9 billion in net client cash inflows and $17 billion on a year-to-date basis, representing an annualized organic growth rate of 3% thus far in 2025. Our strong organic growth this year reflects rapidly growing client demand for liquid alternative strategies and ongoing momentum in private markets fundraising. In the quarter, our affiliates generated $18 billion in net inflows in alternatives, more than offsetting $9 billion in outflows in active equities and highlighting the advantages of AMG's business profile that is increasingly weighted toward high-growth alternative asset classes. In liquid alternatives, our affiliates' value proposition continues to resonate with clients. With $14 billion in net inflows, AMG posted the strongest quarterly net flows in liquid alternatives in our history, driven primarily by tax-aware solutions, and supported by positive contributions from a number of affiliates. Client demand for tax-aware strategies remains substantial, and AMG's affiliates offer highly attractive products. More broadly, AMG's diverse group of affiliates managing liquid alternative strategies is well positioned to deliver excellent risk-adjusted returns for clients and attract new flows over time. Our private markets affiliates raised $4 billion in the quarter, mainly driven by another strong quarter at Pantheon and positive contributions from EIG and Abacus, demonstrating the diversity of our affiliates' offerings across private market solutions, credit, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure. The ongoing fundraising momentum of our private markets affiliates reflects investors' conviction in their specialized investment strategies, along with the impact of ongoing secular growth trends. Looking ahead, the management and performance fee potential across our private markets affiliates, including some of our most recent new investment partnerships, which are not yet reflected in our results, represents a significant source of upside for the long-term earnings profile of our business. As we continue to form new partnerships with growing, high-quality independent firms, such as our new investments in Northbridge, Verition, Montefiore, and Qualitas Energy this year, and our strategic collaboration with BBH Credit Partners, we are broadening our exposure to fast-growing specialty areas within alternatives and further diversifying our business. BBH's taxable fixed income franchise has delivered top quartile performance across strategies and market environments. Our strategic collaboration will bring the firm's industry-leading structured and alternative credit expertise into the U.S. wealth marketplace. As high net worth clients and their advisers continue to drive demand for alternative strategies, credit remains a core focus. The return characteristics and scalability of structured credit make this area uniquely attractive. BBH is one of the industry's longest-tenured and most active players, with a differentiated structured credit investment track record across the full capital stack, and in combination with AMG's product development and distribution capabilities, we see significant opportunity to build unique investment solutions to meet growing demand. AMG provided excellent alignment with BBH's goals for a number of reasons: the complementary strengths of our respective businesses, access to significant seed capital, the permanent nature of our model, and strong cultural connectivity across our firms. The strategic collaboration will accelerate the expansion of BBH's structured credit franchise and will further enhance AMG's position as a leading sponsor of alternative strategies for the U.S. wealth market. The rapidly growing demand in U.S. wealth for distinctive alternative products is one of the most visible mega trends in the asset management industry today, and AMG is uniquely positioned to benefit. AQR has been a leader for more than a decade in developing and delivering excellent investment solutions to U.S. wealth clients, and its innovation and tax-aware strategies continue to drive rapid adoption. Pantheon was one of the earliest innovators in limited liquidity vehicles in private markets, and product development and flows are accelerating across its product line. Our collaboration with BBH Credit Partners speaks to the success that AMG has seen thus far in driving growth in alternatives in the wealth channel, and we see significant opportunities ahead. As clients increasingly look to AMG as the industry's leading entry point to access the differentiated alternative investment capabilities of independent partner-owned firms, AMG's footprint in U.S. wealth is well positioned for rapid growth. Importantly, the success that we are having in the U.S. wealth channel is resonating not only with clients and existing AMG affiliates but also with new investment prospects, as accessing this attractive market requires scale and is difficult, if not impossible, for many independent firms to do on their own. As we continue to invest in new partnerships with alternatives firms, we look forward to collaborating with additional affiliates to broaden their reach and expand their platforms. AMG's business has continued to evolve in 2025, driven by our focus on allocating our resources and capital to areas of secular growth. As we execute our strategy, we expect the contribution from alternative businesses to further increase, enhancing our long-term organic growth profile and earnings profile, and we are excited about the opportunities ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dava to discuss our third quarter results and guidance.

Dava Ritchea, CFO

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. It has been an exciting year for AMG. In 2025 to date, we have committed approximately $1.5 billion in capital across growth investments and share repurchases, and we continue to be in a strong position to execute on future growth opportunities and return capital to shareholders, given our significant cash generation and strong balance sheet. I will start by walking through the results for the quarter then will discuss the positive impact of recent capital activity on our forward earnings power and conclude with a discussion on our balance sheet. In the third quarter, we reported adjusted EBITDA of $251 million, which grew 17% year-over-year. This included $11 million in net performance fee earnings and reflected a full quarter contribution from Verition and Peppertree's final contribution. Fee-related earnings, which exclude net performance fees, grew 15% year-over-year driven by the positive impact of our investment performance and organic growth in our alternative strategies, partially offset by outflows from fundamental equity strategies. Economic earnings per share of $6.10 grew 27% year-over-year, additionally benefiting from share repurchases. Now moving to fourth quarter guidance. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $325 million and $370 million based on current AUM levels, reflecting our market blend, which was up 1% quarter-to-date as of Friday and including net performance fees of $75 million to $120 million, bringing expected performance fees for this year to between $110 million and $155 million. This guidance includes a full quarter contribution from Montefiore, a full quarter contribution from Comvest's private credit business and no impact from our announced investments in Qualitas Energy and BBH Credit Partners, which are expected to close in Q4 and Q1 2026, respectively. We expect fourth quarter economic earnings per share to be between $8.10 and $9.26, assuming an adjusted weighted average share count of 28.9 million for the quarter. Looking further ahead, we anticipate a meaningful increase in our full year adjusted EBITDA and economic earnings per share in 2026, mainly driven by strong organic growth and our capital allocation strategy, and I'll describe each of these further. Organic growth in our existing business is having a meaningful impact on bottom line earnings. Strong organic growth in alternatives including record inflows and alternatives year-to-date is driving growth in AUM, having a positive impact on our aggregate fee rate relative to the prior year and incrementally expanding margins at some of our largest alternative affiliates. Furthermore, the approximately $1.5 billion committed to growth investments and share repurchases, combined with the sale of our stakes in two of our private market affiliates, is expected to substantially increase our earnings in 2026. Additionally, we believe there is incremental upside to our earnings potential over time as we strategically engage with each of our five new partners in the next phase of their success. This combination of organic growth in our existing business and new investment activity has led to strong year-over-year earnings growth so far in 2025 and underpins our confidence in our 2026 earnings profile. Importantly, most of this earnings growth is in fee-related earnings delivered by products with longer expected duration. Finally, turning to the balance sheet and capital allocation. We repurchased approximately $77 million in shares in the third quarter, bringing year-to-date repurchases to approximately $350 million. We are increasing our full year guidance for repurchases and now expect to repurchase at least $500 million, subject to market conditions and capital allocation activity. Our balance sheet remains in a strong position with long-dated debt, significant capacity from ongoing cash generation and access to our revolver. Additionally, we received pre-tax proceeds of approximately $260 million from the sale of our stake in Peppertree, which closed in the third quarter and will receive approximately $285 million in proceeds from the sale of our stake in Comvest. Given our ample financial flexibility, which is further enhanced by the proceeds from these affiliate transactions, we are well positioned to continue to invest in growth opportunities and return capital to shareholders. We continue to employ a deliberate, strategic and disciplined approach to allocating our capital and investing in the ongoing growth of our business. We have a diverse, unique set of opportunities available to us, including investments in new affiliate partnerships and alongside existing affiliates, and in AMG capabilities. Through our capital allocation framework, we selectively engage in opportunities that align with our overall business strategy and that we believe will create significant long-term value. And looking ahead, we are confident in our ability to continue to generate substantial value for our shareholders. Now we are happy to take your questions.

Operator, Operator

Our first question comes from the line of Bill Katz with TD Cowen.

William Katz, Analyst

Jay, maybe one for you. I think the theme coming out of today's call is just the franchise momentum both from a de novo perspective as well as incrementally through inorganic. A, maybe I was wondering if you could just delve a little bit more into BBH, how that sort of rose? Did they seek you out? And then just as you look at the pipeline looking ahead, how should we be thinking about activity level into next year after a really strong 2025?

Jay Horgen, CEO

Thank you, Bill, for your questions. I'll address the first one regarding momentum. Tom, could you discuss BBH, and then we can revisit the pipeline together? Yes, I agree with your perspective. It has been a landmark year for AMG, reflecting our strategy over the past six years, both through inorganic and organic means. Our flow profile, largely driven by alternatives, has been steadily improving. This quarter marks our second notably positive quarter, indicating growth that we believe will continue. Our strategic partnerships with affiliates, aimed at enhancing their long-term success, have yielded significant outcomes at firms like Pantheon, AQR, Artemis, and Garda, among others, as we work on business development initiatives to boost their value. This has been one of our most active years in terms of new investment activity, nearly reaching record levels of capital deployment. We have announced four new investments and a strategic collaboration with BBH, which Tom will elaborate on shortly. We've also completed two stake sales involving consolidators Peppertree and Comvest. It’s been an exceptionally busy year for us. Looking at our business today, alternatives make up 55% of our EBITDA on a run rate basis, and we aim to increase that to over two-thirds in the coming years. We believe this will support our organic growth while also presenting opportunities for new investments. Furthermore, our commitment to disciplined capital allocation has led to $350 million in share repurchases this year. As Dava mentioned, we have updated our guidance to at least $500 million for 2025. Overall, it has been a remarkable year for both new investments and organic growth, setting a strong foundation for accelerating EBITDA and earnings growth in 2026. Now, Tom, could you provide more details about BBH?

Tom Wojcik, President and COO

Yes, happy to. Thanks for your question, Bill, I think Jay provided a lot of very good context in terms of our strategy overall. And really, when we think about the BBH strategic collaboration, it aligns very well with a number of different elements of our strategy and key themes and areas that we're really focused on like alternatives and like the growing opportunity for alternatives in U.S. wealth. Over the course of the past couple of years, you've heard us on earnings calls and some of our meetings talk about this repositioning that we've gone through in our U.S. wealth business really to just focus that organization on the opportunity and alternatives. We've built a new affiliate product strategy team. We've channelized our sales force to address both RIAs and the wire house opportunity. And we're partnering very closely with affiliates like Pantheon to build, seed and distribute differentiated investment solutions to U.S. wealth clients. So in a lot of ways, the strategic collaboration with BBH is both a recognition of the success that we've had to date in going through that change to our U.S. wealth platform and the opportunity and the success that we're seeing, but also the next chapter in terms of opportunity to build on that success with a great partner like BBH. BBH is one of the most respected and trusted brands in financial services globally, and we're very excited to work closely together with them. You asked how this came together. And effectively, I would say we found each other. They had an opportunity that they were thinking about in terms of an excellent structured credit franchise. We had a strong view on structured credit as an opportunity in U.S. wealth and there was a real complementary opportunity for us to come together and try and build something together. We do think that BBH choosing AMG to be their strategic collaboration partner is a very strong statement on our value proposition in U.S. wealth. And I mentioned some of this in my prepared remarks, but we think AMG was the right partner for them for a number of reasons. As I mentioned, the complementary strengths of our respective businesses there in terms of underwriting, pricing, risk management around structured credit and on our side, product development and capital formation resources, access to significant seed capital that we underwrote as part of this collaboration. The permanent nature of our model and also, very importantly, really strong cultural connectivity across our firms. We spent a lot of time together, got to know one another very well. I think we have a shared vision for where we can take this. Collectively, we're really excited about the collaboration. We think it will materially accelerate the expansion of BBH structured credit capabilities and also further enhance AMG's position as a leading sponsor of alternative strategies for the U.S. wealth market as we continue to build momentum in that area. So Jay, maybe back to you on the pipeline.

Jay Horgen, CEO

Yes, I'll just mention that it has been very validating and rewarding to see our capital formation capabilities, an area where we've invested heavily in repositioning. This was a key aspect of our strategic collaboration with BBH, and we believe it will enable us to introduce more products in the wealth space revolving around alternatives. We're very excited about this. Regarding the pipeline, as I've already stated, we are experiencing near record levels of deployment from our perspective. We continue to spot opportunities for growth in both new and existing affiliates, and our pipeline reflects these opportunities. At a high level, we're focused on areas of secular growth within private markets and liquid alternatives. Importantly, we're interested in partnering with businesses where AMG's strategic capabilities can add value, and where firms are looking for a strategic partner. This has increasingly featured in our discussions and contributes to our distinct path to success. We aim to amplify our affiliates' business plans and initiatives through our active engagement with them. We have a strong track record of providing capital and resources in areas such as business development, product development, and distribution. We're eager to continue adding new affiliates in sectors where we can support their growth. This unique advantage enhances our appeal in the market, all while we maintain independence, which we've always done effectively. In addition to the significant opportunity we have to invest capital in growth initiatives, we will remain disciplined. Our goal is to deploy our capital in the highest quality opportunities targeting mid- to high-teens returns, as we've indicated previously. We have successfully done this over the past six years, but if we can't find satisfactory investment opportunities, we will consider returning capital through share repurchases, during which we have reduced our share count by 40%. In summary, we are optimistic about our new investment opportunities. We are confident in our ability to originate investments in new affiliates focusing on secular growth, and we believe we will continue to evolve our business through these growth investments, enhancing shareholder value over time. Thank you for your questions.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs.

Alexander Blostein, Analyst

So lots of enthusiasm from you guys in 2026. It feels like it's a little bit earlier than typical to give guidance in 2026, but I was wondering if you could help contextualize what that could mean for next year given a number of moving pieces including you alluded to expansion in the margins at AQR and Pantheon, that sounds like it's an important part of the story here as well. So any way you can help us frame what sort of the growth expectations you might have so far into 2026 would be helpful.

Jay Horgen, CEO

Thank you, Alex, and good morning. I'll pass it to Dava for more details, but to start, one reason we're excited about 2026 is that when we make new investments, they only contribute partially in their initial year. The full impact of those investments will be felt the following year, which in this case is 2026. Additionally, we've experienced strong organic growth since the middle of this year, which is maintaining its momentum. As you noted, there's also an advantage because this growth is occurring in areas where we can increase our margins. I'll let Dava provide further insights into the mix and our outlook. Although it might be early to finalize 2026 projections, we can certainly share some preliminary thoughts.

Dava Ritchea, CFO

That's right. Thanks, Jay, and thanks, Alex, for the question. At a high level, we expect the combination of new investments, share repurchases and the impact of net inflows from alternatives to be impactful to our 2026 EPS. Really, given the strategic evolution of our business profile over the last six years towards greater participation and alternatives, the EBITDA impact of the growth that we're seeing today is really meaningful. The largest driver of that has been a turnaround in our net flow profile as we've moved the business from what was shrinking organically around 10% annually to a business that today grew 3% annualized on a year-to-date basis and 5% annualized this quarter. And as we've experienced an even larger EBITDA contribution, the past two quarters from our net flows than our organic growth rate would indicate. So we're seeing some further expansion in EBITDA than you would expect in our net organic growth rate. This trend is occurring because of the bifurcation we've seen between strong organic growth on the alternative side, and the headwinds on the traditional side. The growth in alternatives is moving the business towards a higher fee and longer lock strategies that, in some cases, have future performance fee and carry potential while the outflows have been more isolated to lower fee open-ended equity funds. So even though we tend to own more of the firms where we're experiencing outflows, the higher fee rate from the alternative products has more than offset this impact. We'll give some further guidance on the next earnings call in terms of our overall thoughts on 2026.

Jay Horgen, CEO

Dava, you might just want to also talk about just the composition between NFRE and PRE just briefly. I think that's also something that's meaningful that's happening.

Dava Ritchea, CFO

Sure. We have seen some exciting developments this year, driven by both a new investment profile and organic growth. Our year-over-year aggregate fee rate and real growth in fee-related earnings have risen by about 15% compared to the same quarter last year. Additionally, our business mix is increasingly leaning towards a higher contribution from fee-related earnings.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon with Jefferies.

Ritwik Roy, Analyst

This is Rick Roy on for Dan. So you reported another quarter of accelerating liquid alts flows, and it sounds like momentum in the tax aware AQR strategies continues to be a big contributor towards that. So maybe on that, I was hoping you could add a little bit more color on the full diversity of flows coming from the AQR broader franchise and maybe perhaps also describing the performance fee potential of the broader set of AQR strategies that are gathering inflows? And then maybe separately, if you could note any notable private markets fund raises to be aware of in the near-term and into 2026, that would be helpful.

Jay Horgen, CEO

Thanks, Rick. I'm going to let Tom just sort of give you an overview of flows, and I'm sure within that, he will drill down on some of the trends that we're seeing.

Tom Wojcik, President and COO

Rick, thanks for the question and Jay, actually, maybe after I go through this, you can give a little bit more color on AQR specifically, but I'll give you the whole picture and then we can fill in from there. To put the whole thing in context, our flows are primarily a function of three key drivers. The first is the alignment between our affiliates' investment strategies and overall client demand trends. The second is the evolution of our business mix and Dava just talked about some of this as to Jay, over time through both organic growth rates, the relative organic growth rates of our different business lines, and the investments that AMG is making to form new partnerships and growth areas in line with our strategy. And then finally, the third driver is really the lift that we're able to provide at the AMG level to our affiliates through new product development and distribution. In terms of alignment with client demand trends, with approximately 55% of our EBITDA now coming from alternative asset classes and a growing portion coming from wealth clients, our overall positioning is very well aligned with forward trends. In terms of where we go from here, as we look to continue to push that percentage of EBITDA from all closer to the two-thirds level over the course of time, all of our recent new investment partnerships have been focused on alternatives. And significantly more than 100% of our total net flows over the past few years have also been in alternatives. Over that same time frame, we've grown alternatives AUM on our U.S. wealth platform from about $1 billion to more than $7 billion. You're seeing the cumulative impact of that business mix evolution on AUM on our fee rate, as Dava just talked about, and on the contribution of EBITDA that's coming from alternatives overall. So to go into the individual buckets in private markets, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our affiliates raised $4 billion in the quarter and that's really a continuation of momentum that we've been seeing over the course of the past several years. It was another very strong quarter for Pantheon, alongside positive contributions from EIG and Abacus. Importantly, that really demonstrates the diversity of our affiliate offerings across a variety of different areas, private market solutions, credit, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure where our affiliates are real leaders in these specialized strategies in the market. Liquid alternatives was another record quarter for us, $14 billion in net inflows. As you referenced in your question, driven primarily by solutions for the wealth channel focused on after-tax returns at AQR but importantly, with positive contributions from a number of our liquid alternative affiliates, we're seeing real breadth in that area as well. This is now the fifth consecutive quarter where we've seen positive flows in liquid alternatives. Over that time period, we've seen $38 billion in total net inflows. Equities, we continue to see headwinds, and that's in line with the overall industry. You saw that this quarter with about $9 billion in outflows. That said, it's been another good year for beta, and beta continues to support AUM levels overall. We're also seeing some pockets of strength; Jay mentioned earlier, Artemis, River Road. So there are some real bright spots that we're excited about there also. When you put all those things together kind of back into that initial framework, better alignment with overall client demand trends as we continue to shift our business, continued investments in new affiliates, active collaboration with our affiliates to develop and create innovative new products that can help to drive client demand through our capital formation capabilities, together with our confidence in our ability to continue and maybe even enhance and accelerate the impact of these growth drivers going forward, we feel like we're in a really strong position from an overall franchise perspective in terms of forward organic growth opportunities.

Jay Horgen, CEO

And Rick, let me address AQR specifically. Incrementally, it has been very helpful to our flow profile, but maybe I'll highlight a few key attributes about that business is a very diverse business. The way I describe it is it's a liquid alts business, one of the top three in the world. It has a pretty significant tax-aware wealth business that has a different dynamic than just its overall institutional liquid alts business. And then it has a 40 Act long-only business as well. Because of its excellent performance, it's seeing inflows in each of these areas. I think we would be remiss without stating the obvious, which is a very big, diverse business with lots of different strategies and lots of different opportunities within it. Maybe I'll highlight, though, as I did last quarter, a paradigm shift that's occurring in the wealth channel. AQR is leading or has a leading position in this paradigm shift. The basic strategies to harvest losses have been around for decades, but AQR has brought in an additional set of tools and capabilities to it. They've unlocked the power of investing for after-tax outcomes with the use of liquid alternatives, specifically using long-short investing techniques, either to track market data or they have a goal of absolute return, and that has generated superior after-tax outcomes and that's what's leading to the significant flows. The shift in focus by RIAs to after-tax outcomes from their historical convention of evaluating on pre-tax returns, we think this is just in the very early innings. AQR has quite an opportunity ahead of them. As you know, they've been an innovator in liquid alternatives for more than 20 years now, their ability to bring new strategies and products to the market is one of the best in the industries. They've been building this tax-aware business for some time. They've developed an entire suite of products inside of separate accounts, limited partnerships, and now mutual funds. Their strategies generate for us, management fees and many of them have a potential for performance fees. As I've said in my prepared remarks, AQR has the potential to increase their fee rates here over some period of time as their flow mix changes. They also have an opportunity to increase their margins, and we feel that in our EBITDA contribution that Dava mentioned earlier. I gave most of this background on the prior call. So I thought I might just kind of update you bring you forward on our thoughts today. We see AQR as having a first-mover advantage. It obviously has a differentiated culture and an operating environment that is advantageous compared to most competitors. On the first-mover advantage, it takes time to get on platforms to penetrate the largest RIAs in the country to integrate into systems at the wirehouses. AQR has a more than two-year head start and is now finishing the onboarding just now with several of the largest wealth platforms. We do expect continued momentum from AQR in this area. I would be remiss if I didn't comment on the institutional business, again, with their great performance. They have a very nice pipeline building on the liquid alternative side. Through the lens of AQR, we're seeing increased interest in liquid alternatives more broadly on the institutional side. So maybe the last thing I'll say about AQR is that their assets have grown from approximately $100 billion at the beginning of 2024 to $166 billion as of September 30. You can see there's quite a bit of growth, and most of that came from organic flows. And thank you for your question. Appreciate it.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session and will conclude our call today. We thank you for your interest and participation. You may now disconnect your lines.