Hamilton Lane Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
May 29, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Total asset footprint rose 4% YoY to $958 billion, with AUM up 11% to $138 billion and AUA up 3% to $819 billion at fiscal year-end.
  • Management and advisory fees grew 14% to $514 million and fee-related earnings increased 34% to $276 million, translating into GAAP EPS of $5.41 and non-GAAP EPS of $5.40.
  • Dividend hike of 10% to $2.16 per share marked the eighth consecutive year of double-digit annual increases, reflecting strong cash flow generation.
  • Hamilton Lane saw record deal flow across secondaries and direct investing in 2024, with $72 billion in fee-earning AUM (+10%), specialized funds AUM of $33 billion (+16%), and its evergreen platform nearing $10.7 billion in AUM.
  • The firm restructured its US Private Assets Fund to a high-watermark fee model, recognized $58 million of performance revenues, introduced FRPR in incentive fees, and will exclude stock-based compensation from fee-related earnings going forward.
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Earnings Conference Call
Hamilton Lane Q4 2025
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Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Hamilton Lane Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty five Earnings Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. This call is being recorded on Thursday, 05/29/2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Oh, Head of Shareholder Relations. Please go ahead.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

Thank you, Joanna. Good morning, and welcome to the Hamilton Lane Q4 and Fiscal Year End twenty twenty five Earnings Call. Today, I will be joined by Eric Hirsch, Co Chief Executive Officer and Jeff Armbrister, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release and a slide presentation, which are available on our website. Before we discuss the quarter's results, we want to remind you that we will be making forward looking statements.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

Forward looking statements discuss our current expectations and projections relating to our financial position, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance and business. These forward looking statements do not guarantee future events or performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected. For a discussion of these risks, please review the cautionary statements and risk factors included in the Hamilton Lane fiscal twenty twenty four ten ks and subsequent reports we file with the SEC, including our upcoming Form 10 ks for fiscal twenty twenty five. These forward looking statements are made only as of today, and except as required, we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of them. We will also be referring to non GAAP measures that we view as important in assessing the performance of our business.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

Reconciliation of those non GAAP measures to GAAP can be found in the earnings presentation materials made available on the Shareholders section of the Hamilton Lane website. Our detailed financial results will be made available when our 10 ks is filed. Please note that nothing on this call represents an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase interest in any of Hamilton Lane's products. Let's begin with the highlights and I'll start with our total asset footprint. At fiscal year end 2025, our total asset footprint stood at $958,000,000,000 and represents a 4% increase to our footprint year over year.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

AUM stood at $138,000,000,000 at year end and grew $14,000,000,000 or 11% compared to the prior year. The growth came from both our specialized funds and customized separate accounts. AUA came in at $819,000,000,000 and grew over $23,000,000,000 or 3% relative to the prior year. This stemmed primarily from the result of market value growth and the addition of a variety of technology solutions and back office mandates. For fiscal year twenty twenty five, total management and advisory fees were $514,000,000 and grew 14% year over year.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

Fee related earnings came in at $276,000,000 and grew by 34% versus the prior year. This translated into GAAP EPS of $5.41 based on $217,000,000 of GAAP net income and non GAAP EPS of $5.4 based on $274,000,000 of adjusted net income. Later on, Jeff will provide additional detail on the changes we've implemented regarding fee related earnings. Lastly, our Board has approved a 10% increase to our annual fiscal dividend to $2.16 per share or $0.54 per share per quarter. We have increased our dividend every single year since going public, and this now marks the eighth consecutive annual double digit percentage increase since 2017.

John Oh
John Oh
MD & Head of Shareholder Relations at Hamilton Lane

Our ability to consistently increase distributions to shareholders every year speaks to the growth and strength of our business. With that, I'll turn the call over now to Eric.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Well, we can agree on this. I'll say it certainly isn't boring out there right now. And while I will share plenty of data and results shortly, let me just say that our management team is dealing well with the market volatility and uncertainty, and in a number of cases, are actually capitalizing on opportunities being created because of it. Our results for the quarter are strong and we remain confident in our ability to continue to deliver those results for you, shareholders and clients.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Let me share some data and perspective on the markets. We look back at prior periods of heightened volatility and compare how public equity and private equity fared. We'll use the MSCI World Index given its global composition as that comparison tool. From early two thousand to late two thousand and two, during the dot com collapse, the MSCI was down close to 50% at its lowest point and took nearly four years to fully recover. Whereas private equity at its lowest was down a little over 20%, but valuations recovered within two years of that point.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

A similar pattern emerged during the global financial crisis where the MSCI was down nearly 50% versus 25% for private equity, but valuations recovered within two years for private equity versus four years for the MSCI. Our early assessment is that we will see a similar pattern here again. We believe private equity will fall far less, will be much less volatile, and will recover faster from any downturn. When we look broadly at the investment environment, overall exit activity remains relatively muted, while deal doing continues in a variety of sectors. 2024 deal activity witnessed a bit of a recovery from 2023 in terms of overall number of PE deals getting done and total dollars in those deals.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

From the LP perspective, both contributions and distributions remained below historical averages. However, 2024 distribution activity did see a bit of a pickup. Outside of full exits, GPs continue to seek out alternatives, such as continuation vehicles and NAV loans, in order to send capital back to LPs in a relatively depressed exit environment. This is all resulting in holding periods extending. And while overall deal doing activity remains relatively muted, the story was quite the opposite for Hamilton Lane.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

In calendar twenty twenty four, we saw record deal flow across secondaries and direct investing, with strength coming across each of the sub asset classes. This is largely the result of GPs seeking out capital partners as they find themselves with relatively less capital, and Hamilton Lane continuing to be positioned as a partner of choice. So what does all this mean for Hamilton Lane? Our business is predicated on delivering long term results for our clients. During times of stress and dislocation, we look for opportunities and focus our clients on the long term benefits that a well diversified and strategically constructed private markets portfolio can bring.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

We are continuing to do just that. Moving on to fundraising and fee earning AUM. We produced another strong year of growth, largely driven by our specialized fund platform, specifically our semi liquid evergreen funds, where we continue to add new product lines and expand existing ones. Our total fee earning AUM stood at $72,000,000,000 and grew $6,000,000,000 or 10% relative to the prior year. Our blended fee rate continues to benefit from the shift of fee earning AUM towards higher fee rate specialized funds, most notably our Evergreen products, where growth remains impressive.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Today, it stands at over 60 basis points, excluding the impact from retro fees. At fiscal year end, customized separate accounts stood at $39,000,000,000 and grew by $1,800,000,000 or 5%. Flows for separate accounts primarily come from three sources. New client wins, re ups with existing clients, and contributions from investment activity. Contributions have stabilized as investment activity holds steady and distributions are light given the slowdown in the exit market.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

We work with our clients to map out the construction of their portfolios and plan beyond just the current tranche of capital we are investing for them. As such, we have billions of contracted commitments from our clients to allow us to properly construct portfolios for long term benefit. And these commitments will flow into separate account fee earning AUM as they get turned on over time. Today, our pipeline of new clients and re ups remains robust and we believe this will flow through at a faster rate as markets normalize. Moving on to specialized funds, we continue to generate strong momentum as we have ended fiscal twenty twenty five with specialized fund fee earning AUM at $33,000,000,000 having grown $4,500,000,000 This represents an increase of 16%.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

We continue to maintain solid momentum with our traditional drawdown funds despite a slower institutional fundraising market. We held the final close for our inaugural venture and growth focused specialized fund and raised over $6.00 $6,000,000 from a diverse group of institutional investors around the world. While this is a new product for Hamilton Lane, we've been long standing active investors in the venture and growth space for nearly three decades. The fund is focused on concentrating capital into what we believe to be best in class high growth companies through fund investments with venture and growth managers, direct investments, and solution oriented secondaries. Moving to our second infrastructure fund.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

To date, we've raised nearly $735,000,000 of investor commitments in and alongside the fund, with closes having come in subsequent to quarter end. As a quick refresher, the strategy for this product centers around direct equity and secondaries in the real assets and infrastructure space and generates management fees on a net invested basis. We will remain in market with this fund through the second half of calendar twenty twenty five and are pleased with our momentum here. Our annual strategic opportunities fund continues to take in additional capital and to date we've raised nearly $340,000,000 for this current series. And as a reminder, this product is effectively perpetually fundraising as when we close a sleeve, we immediately open another.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Moving now to our sixth direct equity opportunities fund. At quarter end, we held an additional close for this fund that totaled $181,000,000 of LP commitments, which brings the total commitments raised to nearly $1,300,000,000 This close will be reflected in fiscal Q1 of twenty twenty six, and of the 181,000,000 50 one million dollars came in on committed capital management fee basis, while $130,000,000 came in on net invested capital. It brings the total raise split to 30% on committed and 70% on net invested and we plan to remain in market with this fund into calendar twenty twenty six. Turning now to our Evergreen platform. Demand here continues to be strong across strategy and geography.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

The volatility in the public markets appear to be an additional catalyst for monies moving into the sector. Like others, we too are seeing record level fund flows and minimal redemptions. At last year's shareholder day, we shared our vision on how we planned on growing and scaling this part of the business. The game plan was relatively simple, continue to grow our existing funds and remain active in bringing new evergreen funds to market. We have executed well on both of those fronts.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Our strategy is shaped by listening to the market. Our annual survey of advisors continues to show that the move into this space is here and is growing. Nearly one third of survey respondents report that they plan to allocate 20% or more to the asset class, with another third planning to allocate 10% or more, meaning that a total of nearly 60% of the financial professionals surveyed plan to allocate 10% or more to private market investments in 2025. This represents a 15% increase from our 2024 survey. Again, we'll reiterate that most individual investors have little to no exposure to private markets today.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Their journey is just beginning and we believe we are bringing product to market that helps them achieve those goals. On the new product front, since calendar Q4 of twenty twenty four, we've launched Evergreen Infrastructure Funds for US and non US Investors. This product line as of quarter end sits at nearly $400,000,000 of AUM. More recently, we launched a dedicated secondaries product for U. S.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Investors and a multi manager, multi strategy European long term investment fund or LTIP. And lastly, a dedicated venture and growth product for U. S. Investors. We will be launching more products in the months to come as we continue to build out this business line.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Overall, the platform continues to scale with total AUM at quarter end at nearly $10,700,000,000 Net flows remain robust. For Q1 of twenty twenty five, we saw nearly $1,000,000,000 of net inflows across the platform and for our three seasoned offerings, we took in $835,000,000 of net inflows with March being the second highest individual month in our history for those funds combined. April, despite or maybe as a result of these public market gyrations, was strong with net flows of over $330,000,000 Before I move on, I want to touch on a trend we are seeing with these products that we believe will continue to grow. While conceptually the technology and structure of evergreen vehicles were designed with the individual investor in mind, our experience has shown that institutional investors are moving allocations to these vehicles for many of the same reasons that these products resonate so well with the individual investor. Namely, the fully invested nature of the portfolio and the automatic reinvestment of capital with compounding returns.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

These two components have a stark impact when it comes to comparing the return experiences in both structures. To achieve the same level of multiple of invested capital, closed end structures typically require higher IRRs compared to annualized evergreen returns. To put numbers around this, over the course of an eight year hold period, to achieve an approximate 2x multiple, an evergreen structure would need to produce an annualized return of 10% versus a 16% IRR in a closed end structure. Further, our analysis shows that evergreen funds have outperformed traditional drawdown funds from the late twenty nineteen to the end of twenty twenty four. Now while the difference between the two structures is not overly large, evergreens have outperformed nonetheless, and both have outperformed the MSCI World Index during that same timeframe.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

And now that we have more than five years of our own data to look through, what does our Evergreen investor composition look like? Throughout the entirety of our Evergreen platform today, there are nearly 150 unique institutional investors that have committed to our evergreen funds and these institutions represent over 15% of the capital that has been raised. These institutions range in size from large pension funds to smaller endowments, foundations, and family offices. Historically, smaller institutions and their consultants who had an allocation to private markets would generally look to fill that with a commitment to a multi strategy fund to funds. Today, that allocation is moving to evergreen funds and we've seen that within our own client base.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

They are able to achieve the same goals of exposure to the asset class in a more efficient way. I'll wrap up with our latest strategic technology investment on our balance sheet, which is called seventy three Strings. 73 Strings is an innovative technology providing comprehensive data extraction, monitoring and valuation solutions for the private markets. This AI powered platform streamlines middle office processes for alternative investments, enabling data structuring and standardization, monitoring and fair value estimation. 73 allows asset managers to scale the critical middle office and valuation functions that are essential to growth and product innovation.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

We are proud to support seventy three strings in the Series B round alongside Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Golub, and Broadhaven Ventures. And with that, I'll now pass the call to Jeff, who will cover the financials.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

Thank you, Eric, and good morning, everyone. Before I go into our results, I want to expand on the changes and additions you will have noticed in our reporting for this quarter. These changes impact how we will now recognize incentive fees related to certain Evergreen Fund, as well as how we will now be reporting fee related earnings going forward. Let me start with the change to incentive fees. During the quarter, with approval from shareholders of our US Private Assets fund, we restructured the fund vehicle.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

This resulted in three changes. The first is a move to a high watermark methodology of performance fees where we will be able to crystallize performance fees on a quarterly basis based on continued positive performance. The second includes, on a go forward basis, reductions in our annual management fee rate from 1.5% to 1.4%, and our incentive fee rate from 12.5% to 10%. And finally, the third was the removal of the preferred return. Prior to the change, these funds would otherwise realize performance fees on a deal by deal basis, meaning we would earn performance fees once individual deals or assets were realized, assuming they generated a positive return and satisfied all deal or asset specific waterfalls.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

After we received official approval from the shareholder vote, we were then able to recognize and receive $58,000,000 of fee related performance revenues based on performance from inception of the fund to March 2025. Going forward, these fees will now be called fee related performance revenues, or FRPR, and are included in our incentive fees. We will also be including FRPR as part of our fee related earnings metric. The evergreen products that will now be contributing to FRPR are US Private Assets Fund, U. S.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

Secondaries Fund, U. S. Venture and Growth Fund, and LTIP. Our non U. S.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

Global Private Assets Fund has not changed how it recognizes incentive fees and will remain with its current deal by deal format. It is worth noting here that the various funds in market provided by other solutions providers are not all following a similar strategy. For us, the vast majority of our evergreen AUM has an incentive fee component. In fact, as of March 31, over 85% of our evergreen AUM has incentive fees attached to it. We believe this to be a far higher percentage than others in our space.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

And while we will continue to evaluate market conditions and will look to structure our funds for what best positions us for success with clients, our expectation going forward is that all future evergreen funds that we launch will recognize performance fees with a high watermark methodology. The second change we've now implemented is that we will now be excluding the impact of stock based compensation expense from fee related earnings. We have decided on this change as equity based compensation is non cash compensation provided to retain employees and align employee and shareholder interests, but is not directly correlated with our operating results. We believe this change puts us more in line with market practices. Let's move now to the results where I will also highlight the impact of the changes I've just outlined.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

For fiscal year twenty twenty five, we've achieved strong growth in our business with management and advisory fees up 14% from the prior year. Our specialized funds revenue increased by $54,000,000 or 21% compared to the prior year. This was driven primarily by a $4,000,000,000 increase to fee earning AUM in our Evergreen platform and over $1,000,000,000 raised in our latest secondary fund over the last twelve months. Retro fees for the fiscal year were $21,000,000 primarily stemming from the final close of our most recent secondary fund versus $20,000,000 from that same fund that held closes in the prior year. As a reminder, investors that come into later closes during a fundraise pay retroactive fees dating back to the fund's first close.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

Moving on to customized separate accounts, revenue increased $6,000,000 or 4% compared to the prior year due to the addition of new accounts, re ups from existing clients, and continued investment activity. Revenue from our reporting, monitoring, data, and analytics offerings increased by $5,000,000 or 18% compared to the prior year due primarily to the continued growth of our technology solutions offering. Lastly, the final component of our revenue is incentive fees, which totaled $199,000,000 and are up 95% relative to the prior year. The large year over year increase is primarily due to fee related performance revenues, which are captured in incentive fees, as I touched on earlier. Excluding this initial crystallization impact of $58,000,000 incentive fees were approximately $140,000,000 for the fiscal year and represented growth of 40% year over year.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

The growth in incentive fees came from across the entire transaction platform. Let's turn now to our unrealized carry balance, which was also impacted due to the changes just spoke of. The portion of unrealized carry that was attributed to the U. S. Evergreen Fund has been removed and realized.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

That said, the balance is still up 3% from the prior year. The unrealized carry balance now stands at $1,300,000,000 Moving to expenses. Total expenses increased 88,000,000 compared with the prior year. Total compensation and benefits increased by $70,000,000 relative to the prior year, driven primarily by higher compensation associated with increased headcount, incentive fee related compensation, and equity based compensation. G and A increased $18,000,000 driven primarily by revenue related expenses, including the third party commissions related to our U.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

S. Evergreen product being offered on wirehouses that we've discussed on prior calls. And while we are seeing overall G and A expense increase with revenue related expenses, which is a good thing and can be an indicator of growth to come, we continue to successfully offset this with cost savings and expense discipline in other parts of the business where we have discretion. Let's move now to fee related earnings, or FRE. With our new calculation of FRE, FRE for the year was up $70,000,000 relative to the prior year as a result of the fee related performance revenues and management fee growth discussed earlier.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

FRE margin for the year came in at 48% compared to 45% for the prior year and reflect the equity based compensation change discussed earlier. I'll wrap up now with some commentary on our balance sheet. Our largest asset continues to be our investments alongside our clients in our customized separate accounts and specialized funds. Over the long term, we view these investments as an important component of our continued growth, and we'll continue to invest our balance sheet capital alongside our clients. In regard to our liabilities, we continue to be modestly levered, and we'll continue to evaluate utilizing our strong balance sheet in support of continued growth for the firm.

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

With that, we will now open up the call for questions.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Now begin question session. The first question comes from Ken Worthington at JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Ken Worthington
Ken Worthington
Financial Analyst at JP Morgan

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. So much to ask here. Okay, maybe starting with the margin outlook. So in the past, you've highlighted the margin outlook as being stable.

Ken Worthington
Ken Worthington
Financial Analyst at JP Morgan

As we think about the reporting changes that you're making in terms of FRPR and stock based comp, how does the margin outlook under the new reporting regime look relative to history? Is it still stable? Or do we see changes based on the reporting changes that you've made?

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Thanks Ken, it's Eric. So, the obvious change is what Jeff highlighted, which is obviously the margin compared to the prior margin is up because we've moved things below the line. But in terms of the macro, our view on margin hasn't changed. We expect this to stay stable. You can see what's happening here is we're continuing to invest dramatically back into the business to continue to set ourselves up for future growth.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So whether that is creating new evergreen products, expanding the team, opening up offices, all of that continues, and we will expect that to continue. So, we continue to sort of look for a stable margin profile in the future.

Ken Worthington
Ken Worthington
Financial Analyst at JP Morgan

Okay, great. So along those same lines, G and A is rising. I believe that we've got distribution fees in G and A. You've launched a ton of new product here. Are the fees to the intermediaries on new products changing versus the fees on the pre existing products?

Ken Worthington
Ken Worthington
Financial Analyst at JP Morgan

Like are you seeing demands change by distribution? And I think in the past, you've said that the distribution fees are, I think it was exclusively upfront fees. Are you seeing demand for more trails or more asset based fees pop up as you continue to launch new products and as the wealth management and evergreen businesses continue to mature?

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Ken, Eric, I'll stick with that. So where we're seeing the distribution fees is predominantly in the wires. So not all of our funds are being distributed via wires because the wires today are largely US centric. So the vast majority of our non US flows are outside of wires and therefore outside of distribution fee. In the wires, we typically see that as being upfront, we're not seeing changes to that.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Some have a very, very tiny tail, but for the vast majority it is upfront fee, essentially taking a good portion of our first year management fee. So, no real change to that.

Ken Worthington
Ken Worthington
Financial Analyst at JP Morgan

Okay, great, thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Alex Blostein at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Alex Blostein
Alex Blostein
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Thanks. Good morning. Just maybe piggybacking on Ken's question around margins and just would like to put some numbers around this as well. But I guess if we pull out the benefit to FRE from the pull forward in, fee related performance revenues, which I think, you know, added, you know, give or take $40,000,000 to the reported FRE number. The FRE margin looks to be about 40% for you guys for q for this quarter, for the March for the March.

Alex Blostein
Alex Blostein
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

I guess, a, does that seem reasonable? Anything that suppressed the margins in q in in the first quarter? Because that feels a little bit below versus what you guys were reporting in the past. And also, as you look forward under the new methodology, what are your expectations for FRE margin?

Jeffrey Armbrister
Jeffrey Armbrister
CFO & Treasurer at Hamilton Lane

Alex, this is Jeff. When we look back and retrace the margin that we just announced versus in the past methodology, we get to about the same place in terms of about 43%. And I think what may be occurring as you're looking at it is that you're signing too much margin for the FRPR that has been put in place for this quarter. So the way that we're looking at it is that if you look at compensation less the stock based compensation that we previously had above the line, that comp ratio should be 30% as it relates to the management advisory fee revenue and the new FRPR revenue. And so when you back into that way, going forward, we expect that margin for FRE, as we highlighted with Ken just earlier, to be in the high 40%.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

And Alex, it's Eric. And as we said before, I think management spends not so much time thinking about individual quarters, and we're much more managing the business on an annualized basis. So we're always going see a little bit of seasonality, we're going to see variance in bonus accrual. So quarter to quarter, we're going to see that margin calculation bounce around, but I think for us, we remain clear and steadfast on the annual perspective on that.

Alex Blostein
Alex Blostein
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Got it, alright, that's helpful. Alright. Onto the kind of business side of things. You alluded to the fact that, kind of the inventory of future management fees within separate accounts, I think, are is growing. The fee paying AUM within separate accounts has been fairly range bound for, you know, three, four quarters at this point.

Alex Blostein
Alex Blostein
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

So maybe help contextualize, what gets this business to grow again and any way to size the sort of fee paying AUM that will come into the run rate, upon deployment would be would be helpful. Thanks.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Sure, Alex, Eric, I'll stick with that. I think the separate account business for us has been the most impacted by the macro market. Investors today just don't have as much incentive to sort of get going. And unlike peers, we are still maintaining largely a committed capital model, a lot of it coming with performance fee. And so what we're seeing today is that investors are just kind of waiting to sort of figure out where the markets are going, dealing with volatility, they also have a lot of exposure, again, a slow exit environment is causing capital to not be returned to them, thus feeling some pressure to want to redeploy.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So we're sort of dealing with a couple of headwinds there that we sort of see beginning to lessen up as the market starts to head to hopefully a more normalized pattern. So I think when you combine sort of that with the pipeline, with the amount of capital that's sitting that I said is contracted but hasn't flowed in, we feel good about what the next cycle looks like for us. And you can also see very clearly that when we've had sort of an extra minute of time as a management team, we have been disproportionately allocating that to the growth of the evergreen products. We feel like that right now is a bit of a race. We already have a leading position in the separate account world.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

We need to make sure that we're not losing and making sure that we're running really fast to get these products to market and continuing to establish ourselves. So part of this is also a resource allocation choice that we are making, and we think long term that's a good resource allocation choice to be making.

Alex Blostein
Alex Blostein
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Yep, understood, great, thank you guys.

Operator

Thank you, the next question comes from Mike Brown at Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Hi, Chris. Thanks for taking my question. So Eric, the wealth flows were tremendously strong in March, as you called out, and April as well. But I guess for April, those inflows would have generally been before Liberation Day. So what's your read on the May gross inflows and outflows?

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

And what's your view on if there is kind of step back, where kind of net flows will go from here? Thank you.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Yeah, thanks Mike, Eric. So May looks very strong. We've got a lot of visibility at this point since we're basically at the end of the month. We're not seeing change in redemption, we're not seeing kind of post sort of tariff impacts, change in investor appetite. And as I said in my comments, if anything, it's allowing advisors to sit with customers to say to them, hey, maybe we should think about reducing public equity exposure and reducing some of this volatility and making the move to the private market.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So again, we're certainly not cheering for any economic issues for the country or for anywhere else around the globe. But some of this chaos, volatility, etcetera does create a fear mechanism and it does create a chance for a conversation with advisors who are looking to move clients away from that sixtyforty portfolio, which I think has now been kind of definitively shown to not be the best solution. We're seeing huge correlation between equities and bonds returns in ways we haven't seen historically. All of that pushing people more into the private markets to achieve some real diversity.

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Great, thanks for that. And in your prepared remarks, you had some great color on the institutional interest in the evergreen funds. It was helpful to hear about the broad based growing interest there, so thanks for all that color. What inning would you say that trend could be in if you have a view on that? And then when I think about some of the institutional flows, sometimes that if that starts to come with bigger dollars, there's typically a bit of pressure on the fee rates.

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Is that something that could ultimately manifest in your funds, do you think, over time? Or the reality is that these are evergreen funds, everyone pays the same fee rate, so that's kind of an unlikely dynamic to play out? Thank you.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Yeah, Mike, Eric again. So, in terms of what inning are we in, I would say that the tail end of the national anthem note is still sort of resonating in the stadium. So, we're really early. What that looks like in terms of fee compression, totally to be determined, we're just not seeing any of that today. And again, depending on how the institution is looking at this, if they're using this as an alternative to a traditional two and twenty fund, this is already substantially cheaper than that.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So I think this is a question of a lot of education needs to happen. Again, I think a lot of people have sort of just viewed this as oh, this is for individual investors, showing them exactly what I covered in the script of the performance benefits, frankly some of the cost benefits, because not dealing with capital calls and distributions and having to maintain resources around that, also aside from less headache, is a cost benefit to the client. So all of this is just beginning to happen. Most institutions have been aware of these products for only a couple of years. In institutional world, that's a mere blip in the market.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

And so I think what we're seeing is as people get smarter, see the products as there's more products for them to look at, they're all just beginning to rethink portfolio construction. We see this as a real positive. We see this as a trend, we see this as something that will frankly also help encourage the individual investor because they're gonna see very large sophisticated institutional investors directly alongside of them in the exact same product, so we think all that's good.

Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Great, thank you Eric.

Operator

Thank you. Next question comes from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great, thank you. Eric, you mentioned in your prepared remarks or alluded to that you were taking some steps or thinking about capitalizing on the opportunity here from market volatility. Was hoping maybe you could elaborate a bit on that. Then just how do you think about and frame this period of volatility versus prior, particularly as we think about implications across the private markets for elongated hold periods perhaps reminiscent of the 'six vintages that took many, many years to ultimately exit?

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

Thanks Mike. So I'll start with the what are we doing and what are we capitalizing on. I would put it into a few buckets. One, deal flow, I mentioned that specifically, I just think we're continuing to position ourselves as partner of choice. And so whether that's helping to create liquidity mechanisms via secondaries, whether that's helping to co lead a deal in a co investment environment, whether that's to provide lending dollars to people who are trying to finance a transaction.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So as I said, deal flow up and deal flow up across the sub asset classes. So that's sort of bucket one. Bucket two is talent. I think in times like this, not all of our competitors are doing great. And so if you look at sort of inbound resumes, a chance for us to continue to bring in new terrific individual talent, we're continuing to hire and that is also a real chance I think to capitalize in this market environment.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

And then the third thing I would sort of point to is continuing to lean in hard on the technology side. Seventy three Springs is the most recent example. And if you look again along the caliber of the firms that we're kind of going into that deal alongside of, these are real, we are all kind of market leaders trying to go solve real industry problems in middle office as we're all scaling, is a good example of that. The fact that we have the capital and resources and the relationships and the strategic perspective to do those things, we see as all very positive. So lots of chances for us to take advantage of what's happening in the market, and we're doing that across the board.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

I think the hold periods is a problem. I said the institutional fundraising market is tricky, and it's tricky because capital is just simply not coming back at a pace that LPs are looking for, and if capital is not coming back, that means exposure isn't reducing and so therefore the need for them to want or have to redeploy is diminished. Our view is that this market environment is different than the past because so much of what's happening is being driven politically, it's being driven by various administration initiatives and that's very different, whereas in the past we were seeing more kind of shocks to the system. Here, we're seeing changes in policy that are having real ripple impact across a variety of parts of the economy. So that is different, it also just makes it much more unpredictable around are we done with tariffs, are we going to be appealing tariffs, are we going to the Supreme Court?

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

All of that just creates this environment where there's a lot of unknowns, and I think unknowns creates in some pockets of the world paralysis and that's what we're seeing. Today's maybe not the day to buy or today's not the day to sell or today's not the day to commit, and so people I think are just waiting for more certainty in order to move forward and to take action.

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great. And then just a follow-up question, maybe just digging in a little bit on the institutional interest in Evergreen funds. I heard you mention outperformed the Evergreen versus the drawdown over the past five years. But maybe you could just comment on the magnitude of that outperformance. And then I get the compounding benefits that you mentioned, but how do you think about the drawback of needing to fully deploy the capital pretty quickly in Evergreen Funds after it has been received versus the appeal of drawdown when you have the ability to lean into opportunities over a multi year investment horizon where you could be opportunistic around timing one's entry?

Michael Cyprys
Michael Cyprys
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

How are institutional investors viewing that sort of push pull dynamic? And what's the sort of expectation around ultimately where we get to in terms of institutions shifting over to the Evergreen product?

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

So I think it's going to continue to be a mix, Mike. I think right now what we see is institutions that are adopting it are doing it in one of two ways. They're either very, very small, or as I said in my comments, they would otherwise be utilizing a fund of funds, which has largely become kind of a thing of the past because very expensive double layer of fee, very slow to deploy a big fund of funds. And so for them, the Evergreen is just much more appealing, way more cost efficient, and they're okay with the capital being fully deployed, they're willing to make that trade off. For larger institutions, they're certainly not shifting away exclusively from drawdown funds, they're using these as tools. So maybe they want their credit exposure now, and so they're using an evergreen fund for credit, But they're keeping their equity exposure and drawdown funds because they want that vintage year diversification. So, as I said to the prior question, I think we're so early in this. We wanted to highlight it because 15% of the capital is not insignificant and 150 institutions is not insignificant. And so we're starting to see data here and starting to get feedback that I think it's worth calling out, so we did.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

But I think we're still very early as to where this is all going, think we just remain encouraged by the fact that people are willing to take a more nuanced look at the product offerings that are in front of them and trying to select what is the right tool for the problem they are solving for their portfolio, and the fact that there are more tools available today is nothing but a positive thing. Great, thanks so much.

Operator

Thank you. We have no further questions. I will turn the call back over to Eric Hirsch for closing comments.

Erik Hirsch
Erik Hirsch
Co-CEO & Member of the Board at Hamilton Lane

With that, I'll simply say thank you, thank you for the time, thank you for the support, thank you for the questions, and wishing everyone a wonderful and safe day. Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect. Goodbye.

Executives
    • John Oh
      John Oh
      MD & Head of Shareholder Relations
    • Erik Hirsch
      Erik Hirsch
      Co-CEO & Member of the Board
    • Jeffrey Armbrister
      Jeffrey Armbrister
      CFO & Treasurer
Analysts
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