Marty Flanagan
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thank you very much, and thank you, everybody, for joining us. The Q3 presentation is available on the website for your reference. But to allow more time for Q&A, we're going to shorten our prepared remarks and really get the questions quite quickly. So I'll just give a brief overview of the results and Loren make a couple of comments, and again, we'll get the questions, so we’ll have more time to have a discussion. So now only four months post the close of the acquisition of Oppenheimer made tremendous progress, bringing the two organizations together, and you can see by this quarter it's generating meaningful results already. As we've discussed on previous calls, we do look at this as a multiyear growth story that people's relationships in the U.S. provides this capabilities to take around the world, while also creative skills for organization. That said, the first full quarter of the combined organization has delivered powerful results. If you look at very strong earnings quarter-over-quarter generating $502 million operating income at 38% improvements as compared to last quarter. Operating margin expansion exceeding 500 basis points, taking our margin up to 40.9%. The combined firm added $200 million net revenues during the quarter, while adding only less than $60 million in expenses. And we're particularly pleased to announce that we're bringing on our expense synergies well ahead of schedule and exceeding our initial target of $475 million. We are now estimating savings of $501 million. Importantly, we achieved these results and what was a very challenging macroenvironmental flows and also been the early days this combination between our two organizations. During the quarter, clients reacted to the market news by keep risking, which resulted in outflows in our Americas and UK retail businesses. Flows in our legacy or byproducts low during the quarter, which we had expected, but they are stabilizing. We will speak about that in a couple of minutes. These outflows were offset by positive flows in China, EMEA, ex-U.K. business and ETFs. So the positive flows during the quarter really demonstrate the tremendous strength and potential to combination. Furthermore, the operating and financial strength of the combined firm enable us to return $440 million to common shareholders during the quarter through dividends and stock buybacks. So finally, it is still very early days, but from our perspective, the initial results are very strong. Loren?