Good morning. My name is Adam, and I will be your conference facilitator today. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Janus Henderson Group Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results Briefing. [Operator Instructions] In today's conference call, certain matters discussed may constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results could material differently from those projected in the forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including, but not limited to, those described in the forward-looking statements and risk factors sections of the company's most recent Form 10-K and other more recent filings made with the SEC. Janus Henderson assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during the call. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to introduce Ali Dibadj, Chief Executive Officer of Janus Henderson. Mr. Dibadj, you may begin your conference.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today on Janus Henderson's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. I'm Ali Dibadj, I'm joined by our CFO, Roger Thompson. In today's call, I'll start with some comments on the momentum being generated across the business. Roger will then go through the quarterly results. And after that, I'll provide an update on the strategic progress we made over the last 12 months. After those prepared remarks, we'll take your questions. Turning to Slide 2. 2024 demonstrated several signs of clear progress at Janus Henderson. This progress was a result of colleagues who locked armed collaboratively as one firm to continue building our momentum by accomplishing many new and major milestones that support our purpose of investing in a brighter future together in our strategy. We're encouraged that our net flows turned positive in 2024, finishing the year with $2.4 billion of net inflows. This is a tremendous accomplishment and has vastly improved from only two years ago when we experienced $31 billion of net outflows. Delivering positive active flows is a key differentiator for Janus Henderson in an industry with well-documented active flow headwinds. The positive net inflows resulted from a diversified set of regions and investment strategies. In the intermediary channel, North America, EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific all delivered positive flows in 2024, and at the firm level, there were 29 investment strategies that produce greater than $100 million in net inflows or roughly 40% increase compared to the prior year. In addition to the net inflows, Janus Henderson generated new net revenue in both the third and fourth quarters. Fee pressures are relentless in this industry and not all AUM is created equally. So, we are pleased with that result. We're seeing success across a mix…

Thanks, Ali, and thank you for joining us on today's call. Starting on Slide 5, and I look at our quarterly results. As Ali has discussed, our solid investment performance, I'll touch briefly here on AUM, flows and EPS. Net flows were positive for the third consecutive quarter at $3.3 billion, and ending AUM was down 1% from the third quarter as adverse markets and currency adjustments offset the net inflows. Our financial results are strong, better top line revenue provided by positive markets, a stable net management fee rate, net inflows and outperformance delivered by our investment teams, coupled with operating leverage resulted in adjusted diluted EPS of $1.07, a 30% increase compared to the same period a year ago. Our financial performance and strong balance sheet continue to give us the flexibility to invest in the business, both organically and inorganically and return cash to shareholders. On Slide 6, we'll look at the investment performance in more detail. Investment performance versus benchmark remains solid with the majority of aggregate AUM beating their respective benchmarks over all time periods. The lower 5-year number compared to the prior quarter is primarily driven by the U.S. mid-cap growth strategy within our equities capability and was impacted by the narrow leadership driving market gains in the U.S. for small and mid-cap growth stocks, which weighed on relative returns to benchmark. Performance for the strategy compared to peers remained solid, and it's in the first or second Morningstar quartile over all time periods. Overall, investment performance compared to peers is very competitive, with at least three quarters of AUM in the top two Morningstar quartiles over 1-, 3-, 5- and 10-year time periods. Slide 7 shows total company flows by quarter. Net inflows for the quarter were $3.3 billion compared to net inflows…

Thanks, Roger. Turning to Slide 15 and a reminder of our three strategic pillars of Protect & Grow our core businesses, Amplify our strengths, not fully leveraged, and Diversify where clients give us the right to win. We are in the execution phase, and we believe this strategic vision has us on the path to over time, consistently deliver organic growth. Over the next few slides, I'll highlight several examples of the progress made in 2024 across the three pillars. Moving to Slide 16, which details the improving business trends in the U.S. intermediary channel. Net flows were positive for this channel for the second consecutive year, resulting in a 7% organic growth rate compared to 1% growth in 2023, a tremendous result given industry headwinds. Very importantly, we are capturing market share in both gross sales and net flows. We've talked previously about our national brand campaign in the U.S., which was something new for Janus Henderson and a substantial change from what we've done in the past. The investment made has resulted in a strengthened brand profile that positions Janus Henderson as a trusted financial partner. As I mentioned earlier, we are investing in leveraging AI and machine learning to support the North America Client Group. We believe we are at the forefront of a technology, AI, which will fundamentally transform how we interact with and service our clients. The amount of data at our fingertips is immense and the challenging opportunity is how to turn this data into powerful and actionable information and acumen that will help Janus Henderson drive and anticipate our clients' needs, deliver differentiated insights and accelerate growth. Slide 17 highlights the meaningful progress made under the strategic pillar of Amplify. Our suite of active ETFs experienced another successful year. Net flows were positive…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Brennan Hawken from UBS. Brennan, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Ali and Roger curious about the ETF strategy. So, momentum has been really quite solid, and it's really quite remarkable given the heritage in equities rather than fixed income. So you've said in the past, you're not really interested in clone-type ETF products. So, could you maybe give us an idea about how you're thinking about bringing equity products? We've seen a few filings and heard of a few filings, but what are the plans for 2025? And how big do you think that offering can get?

Sure. Happy to start, Brennan. Thanks for the question. You're right. We're pretty proud of what the team has done with the ETF franchise. We're now the eighth largest provider of active ETFs in the world period. And the third largest provider of active fixed income ETFs by assets under management, and that's close to $30 billion. We see enormous opportunity in the ETF landscape as a wrapper, not just because it's a wrapper that in some instances, is better for clients' needs, and we can talk about the reasons there, but also because they wrap a really strong investment product that we have. And you mentioned the fixed income landscape in particular, is a perfect example. We have now four fixed income ETFs that are above $1 billion each. And that's not because of the wrapper only. That's because we had really great investment performance, really great portfolio managers, really great research, really great teams, who, if you look at the performance numbers, delivered really a solid performance for our clients, but they weren't in the decision set, so to speak, of our client base. It's just not something we had gone after in a very heavy manner. And the ETFs allowed us to unlock that, and in fact, lock it pretty well. So, we think that we have the opportunity to build on the fixed income side on ETFs for sure. To your point, though, that's allowed us to then enter the mindset of ETFs more broadly on the active side for equity is two. So, to what you noted, we've launched a couple on the equity side. There will be more launched on the equity side, because, again, we're taking things that are unique and differentiated from a performance perspective, not clones, but unique and different from an investment perspective and bringing that to clients in a form factor that clients appreciate. Now, a lot of that discussion is around the U.S. Now outside the U.S., you'll note the Tabula acquisition that we made, that's been very, very helpful and a great integration for us to work together. And we're finding that there's enormous opportunity in Europe to drive ETF growth as well. And you may have heard this on other calls, but just their repetition. The patterns we're seeing in the European markets on ETFs is similar to what we would have seen in the U.S., call it, seven or eight years ago. Similar patterns in terms of growth, and we want to be part of the leadership there and with Tabula, we think we can do that. We launched Japan high conviction, we launched pan-European high conviction, in ETF forms. And most recently, we launched the European version of JAAA, so JCL0. Again, we think there's enormous opportunity here. We want to be part of the leadership. And so far, we have been.

Thanks for that color. That's helpful. Roger, my follow-up, I'd love to ask you about the 2025 outlook for expenses. So, you mentioned that assumes flat markets. So, curious if you could please let us know what kind of leverage -- operating leverage you'd expect in both comp ratio and on the sensitivity for non-comp to upside from market beta. Thanks.

Yeah. Hi, Brennan. I mean you've seen that over the last two years, and that would continue if markets do it to go up. So, our comp ratio has come down by 1.8% over the last year. We've signaled it will go down -- it should go down a little bit more with flat markets and that will continue. And the same thing in our op margin. Our op margin is up pretty significantly in percentage terms year-on-year and positive markets. There is leverage in this business. We will continue to invest in the business. We've given guidance on costs. That is positive markets and positive sentiment. It may mean you do a little bit more on cost, but there's definitely leverage in the business. So, if markets were to rise, then you would expect to see leverage both on the comp ratio coming down and the op margin going up.

Right. But is there any like rule of thumb, whereas 100 basis points in markets translates to blank leverage, or is it not that simple?

It's not quite that simple. It depends where from, et cetera. So, we'll see it as it will come.

Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.

The next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America. Craig, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Ali. Hope everyone is doing well.

Thanks, and you too.

So, I don't normally say these things, but I did want to congratulate you on the successful turnaround in place, which we know is very hard in asset management. I think this actually was Janus' first positive flow year since 2009 for legacy Janus, even then it was barely positive.

Thanks. It's a team effort. We're putting one foot for the other, and hopefully, the results continue to be okay.

So, Ali, my question is on fixed income. So, investment performance is currently very strong. I think the timing is pretty perfect for duration extensions. We're already seeing a nice lift in your flows there. We know there's many funds inside of that business, and we know there's a big one driving that. But I'm curious in terms of performance, what factors and themes do you attribute the strong performance to besides just security selection?

So, we are very pleased with the light that is being shown on the fixed income business. These teams, to your point, have performed extraordinarily well across many, many different strategies. 1-, 3-, 5-, 10-year beating benchmark, 91%, 84%, 86%, 94%, top two Morningstar quartiles, same timeframes, 84%, 74%, 71%, 75%. I wish I could have gotten those types of scores in school. I mean, these are really strong numbers. And we see it very broad. So, areas like multi-asset credit, multi-sector income are there for investors who want things that are more income related, obviously. We have obviously, to your point, the suite of fixed income ETFs, the JAAAs, but also JBBBs, JIII, JMBS, among others, that allow institutional access to -- well, retail access to institutional type investments. We have very strong regional strategies. A little bit to your question, very strong in Australia, very strong in some parts of Europe. We have the emerging market debt strategy and really good high yield and other strategies, let in some of the private credit stuff that we're doing. So, it's fairly broad-based. It does come certainly from security selection, but also allocation depending on the strategy between asset classes, between regions. Certainly, if you read our themes for 2025, we believe, for example, that going to the securitized marketplace still sees a lot of opportunity for investors as opposed to kind of a typical corporate IG. So we still see opportunities in a lot of our fixed income portfolio. And we're, again, very pleased that people are paying attention to it. We're willing to invest and we are, and we want to grow that business quite substantially.

Thank you, Ali. And just sticking with fixed income, but flipping the conversation from performance to flows. What is the outlook for 2025, just given the likely better industry flow outlook, your very good performance, you have money in motion from a very large competitor and you also ended the year with a lot of momentum heading into the fourth quarter?

Well, we're going to continue to, as I said before, put one foot in front of the other and try to deliver on flows. And the pride that we have on delivering on flows isn't just for these types of calls, right? It's most importantly because that allows us to deliver for more clients and more end clients to add to the 60 million clients that we have around the world. We are hopeful that we can continue to deliver growth in that sector, not just in the ETF suite that we have in the U.S., but now in Europe, but also, obviously, for our clients in the institutional world, whether they be insurance clients as we're trying to grow those or others. So look, we're going to control what we can control and put one foot in front of the other. But hopefully, the momentum, as you suggest in your question, that continues for us.

Thank you.

Next question comes from Bill Katz at TD Cowen. Bill, your line is open. Please go ahead.

I appreciate the update and the guidance. Just thinking about the development you've seen in the Protect & Grow side, particularly on the intermediary, which is the biggest swing factor for your business, and then on the institutional side, the incremental opportunity, I was wondering if you could just unpack and maybe click in one more layer deeper in terms of what you're hearing from either the gatekeepers or sort of on-the-ground financial advisers that is allowing the acceleration of growth and sales, both net and gross. Is it just the brand campaign? Is it the efficacy? Is it the marketing? All of the above? The data seems very compelling to me. And then you mentioned that you're seeing some good signs in the build-out of the sort of the institutional block. Just sort of wondering what's resonating with the consultant community and how you think about that looking ahead. Thank you.

Thanks, Bill. So, let me tackle that in two buckets, and Roger can jump in and redirect anywhere. First, from the intermediary side, you're right, we're very pleased about the momentum, the partnership we've built with our clients and "gatekeepers" but really, we see them as clients. And I think that the U.S. is the first place, as you know, that we've really implemented some of the changes, and we're trying to broaden that out. And just to double-click to your words, what we did in the U.S. is we, first and foremost, made sure that we had the right people in the right seats. There were a lot of changes in the management teams that we put in place there was step one. We then want to make sure that production levels were high and production levels were high, not just in terms of people running around and making every single call, but making sure that the data was supportive of whom they were calling, how often with what information. So, there's a real big data exercise that I mentioned earlier on that I think will continue and help there. So, the productivity was much higher. Yes, the promotional element or the marketing element helped quite a bit, putting us on people's radar screens. But also we had to tie compensation to growth for our new batch of people or somewhat changed batch of people. And then, of course, we have to make sure the product was right. And that's not just product in terms of the investment strategy. That's also in terms of the communication. It's also in terms of the client service. That's also in terms of being there when a client wants to talk to us, a portfolio manager or me, whomever. So, it's the compounding…

Okay. And just as a follow-up, you mentioned the M&A story a little bit. I was just sort of wondering, obviously, you have a couple of deals that you're integrating into the new year. That seems to be going along very well. You're generating a ton of free cash flow. Your payout rate is only about 70%. So, how do we think about the opportunity on the inorganic side? And I'm wondering if you could also talk about the possibility of beefing up your ownership of Privacore, which could then potentially increase your flow profile. Thank you.

So, let me start with the first one, and I'll hand over on Privacore to Roger. The M&A pipeline is very robust, I think, for everybody in the industry, frankly. We will continue to buy, build or partner to support our strategy, to support Protect & Grow to support Amplify and certainly to support Diversify, and we've shown that. But we're going to be very client-led in all the M&A that we do. We do a lot of diligence on the companies, and it's not just dollars and cents and numbers on spreadsheets. It's a lot of time with the management teams and making sure the cultural fit as well is there. That's one of the things that's been very important with the acquisitions and the partnerships we've built so far. We got what we expected from a cultural perspective, which knock on wood, is very strong, let alone from a dollars and cents perspective. So, we're going to be very, very disciplined there. I don't have a sense of timing kind of underlying the spirit of the question of when M&A happens. I do know we're integrating these businesses now, and we're quite busy doing that. But over time, if we see things that are opportune for us, we're going to partner with folks who want to grow with us and partner with folks that think that we're a better home for them. Roger, do you want to handle Privacore?

Yeah, sure. Remember, this was a de novo build from scratch. We're 15 months in. But we're definitely very optimistic about the interest being shown on both sides, i.e., we've got best-in-class managers of alternative assets pairing with some great relationships being built now in the wirehouses and the broker-dealers and the RIAs. So, as you say, we own 49%. We're in active dialogue about the strategic options for that. We -- that may include potentially extending the exercise window to buy the remaining 51%. But again, we'll talk about that over time, but we remain very excited about the privates that we're doing in a number of ways, obviously, the acquisitions that Ali talked about, but also Privacore.

The next question comes from Ken Worthington at JPMorgan. Ken, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. First, I'll start. The presentation you guys have put together very helpful. So, thank you for that. In terms of questions, maybe starting with fee rate, you've been able to maintain and improve the fee rate for the last seven quarters, so almost two years. If I look at mix, I assume strong equity markets over the last two years have had some positive contribution to that fee rate, I'll call it, complementing, I think, your commitment to being disciplined about pricing. If 2025 experiences more normal equity and fixed income market returns, what do you expect the fee rate to do? And I know there's a ton of puts and takes, which is why I asked the question, you've got new products, you've got transactions, you've got certain ramps. What is your sense? Does it continue to stay flat here? Or does it edge one direction or the other?

Yeah. Thanks, Ken. And you're quite right. A positive equity market does help the fee rate. If you -- in the appendix of the presentation, and thanks for your comments, so on '25, we've given the fee rates by asset class, which again may help a little bit of that. It also helps show that by asset class, fee rates aren't moving that much. Obviously, we have had significant growth in securitized and the fixed income average rate will have come down a little bit. But from here, it will depend on the growth from here. And as Ali talked about, we've got a range of things we're selling. So, it is active product we're selling at active prices, the right active prices for the right product, but that ranges from enhanced index through to hedge funds. So, it will depend on the mix. And obviously, we're also selling things now more in the alternative space. So, you started to see the VPC fee rate come in. Obviously, as we look to grow that over time, that will increase the fee rate. But broadly, the fee rates come off 1% -- sorry, 1 basis point over two years, yeah, broadly flattish.

Okay. thank you. I'll try some fishing here on Anemoy. You're managing their tokenized fund through, I assume, a sub-advised relationship. You called this out. This seems like it could be interesting. I guess the question is why take on this business? It's hard to think that this is a big money generator. So, I look to blockchain and tokenization, do you have more interest in that sort of technology? Like is there something underlying your willingness to kind of take on this business?

Thanks for the question and for noticing it. Let me start with what this is and then expanding to the last part of your question, Ken. So just for everybody's knowledge, Anemoy is effectively an asset manager that is very much in the tokenized world. And Centrifuge is the sort of platform that does the tokenization underneath it for asset managers, digitizes and managers and distributes funds that are chain focused. And the need that has become present is many institutional companies have on their balance sheet tokenized coins or currencies. And most of what's happened is people have used stablecoin to do that. And stablecoin doesn't have a yield. And that's okay when there is no yield. But now that there is a yield, many of the institutional players and some of them have very, very large balance sheets, as it sounds like you may know, are looking for other ways in the tokenized landscape to get yield. Stablecoins don't give them that. So, they've looked for an opportunity and Anemoy is providing that opportunity with the Centrifuge backbone to provide, for example, treasuries, which have yield. And guess what, we know how to purchase and manage those. And so, you're exactly right. We're in that ecosystem. And we're in that ecosystem because there's a need for a tokenized asset manager or tokenized fund for us to be supporting a client view and a client need to have it. Now, let me take a little bit of a step back to your point of why are we in this. And I don't want to say this too loudly, I guess, but innovation is actually at the core of our corporate strategy. Blockchain readiness and tokenization are ways for us to Amplify, Protect & Grow and also Diversify our businesses. And we do think this collaboration is critical for us to be in the distributed ledger technology world to learn about it and to bring it perhaps forward for asset managers. I think if you take a step way back in our philosophy, we do think, to the last part of your question, that eventually, there will be complete fungibility between private and public, liquid and illiquid assets, hard and soft assets. And if we can learn about that in this manner with two fantastic partners, we're willing to do that. And we want to be, in fact, one of the leaders and at the forefront of this. To your point, it's not a huge tax on our system. It's not a huge cost to us, but it's a lot of learnings that we can bring to bear and hopefully be able to bring that for a broader set of clients.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the questions.

The next question comes from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Alex, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Thank you. Just was hoping to double-click into a couple of strategic areas you guys talked about, I guess, one being European ETF marketplace. Clearly, nice developments there. Could you spend a minute on sort of the economics in that market relative to the U.S. market with respect to things like distribution cost and fee sharing arrangements, et cetera?

Sure. It's a very nascent market. And so, the pool is quite small. It was expected to grow quite significantly. I'm trying to remember the number that's out there from folks, but I think it's $30 trillion, if I'm not mistaken, over the next few years. These are pie in the sky type numbers, but I think people imagine that could be the case over the next 10 years or something. We are not seeing any huge economic differentiation between the U.S. and Europe from an ETF distribution perspective at all because these are, as Roger was saying a second ago to the fee rate question, active strategies within these ETF wrappers. Part of the reason we brought Tabula on board and partnering with them is because they're already very well established in the marketplace, 10-plus regions, 10-plus exchanges. And that is an important part of the ecosystem that we, as Janus Henderson, did not have organic opportunities to get into unless we were going to take a lot of time. So, Tabula is helping us with that. We're not seeing real big economic differences on a per unit cost perspective. But of course, of course, Alex, maybe to your question, the market is a smaller market.

Yeah. I got you. That makes sense. On your point about acquisition pipeline, and you sounded, obviously, like it's quite busy. It's busy for a lot of folks. You remain disciplined. But what are the areas that you feel are more likely to materialize in an actual transaction, either in terms of geography or product base?

I'll tell you when we know, because it's very varied right now. There are a lot of areas that we're looking at geographically, product-wise, across asset classes, there's a lot of interesting opportunities out there. But again, we want to make sure that the right opportunities and that we can digest them appropriately and that they have the right culture. We can always support across Protect & Grow, across Amplify and across Diversify in businesses that we currently have, but also businesses that we're looking to get into. Clearly, in the past, we've talked about privates, we talked about geographic expansion, we've talked about ETFs, but beyond that, I think there are still really interesting opportunities out there. So I don't want to limit it too much to be fair. Suffice it to say that we're always going to be client-led. We're always going to be disciplined. We want to make sure that we have the right cultural fit, not just financial fit.

Yeah. Makes sense. Great. Thanks.

The next question is from Dan Fannon at Jefferies. Dan, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks. Good morning. I wanted to follow up, Roger, on your guidance. Obviously, flat AUM and flat markets, I get, but performance fees are another attribute that as we think about 2025 have the potential to improve given some of the performance as well as it looks like above high watermarks on some of the other strategies. So, how should we think about performance fees into 2025, given what you know today and how that might translate into the expense profile and guidance you've given?

I guess the only thing that we obviously know is what's rolling off. So, the U.S. fulcrum fees, if you trailed off the three years and you added average performance for the last three years then the U.S. mutual fund performance fees would be sort of negative high-single-digits. Now, that would be a meaningful improvement from the negative $39 million in '24. So, that's one piece of performance fees. On the other side, we obviously have a range of things of both long-only funds and absolute hedge funds that are 1-year performance and can be zero or can be big as we know. I guess the thing I would say in those is it is a range. It is a portfolio. We have about $40 billion, I think it is of assets, which have performance fees on them outside of the U.S. mutual funds. So -- but I can't tell you what it will be because I can't tell you what performance is. Relating to what that does for margin, they are -- they obviously have comp associated with them, but they are accretive, performance fees are accretive to our margin.

Okay. And I guess just following up on what's embedded in your guidance, is the -- if any improvement in the mutual fund side and kind of implied in the guidance that you've given for the ranges for 2025?

Yes. That's right. So, yeah, we model out as you do the U.S. mutual funds, and we make a reasonable assumption as to what might happen elsewhere. But as I say, I don't know what future performance will be.

The next question comes from Mike Brown at Wells Fargo. Mike, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Good morning. The flow story at JAAA and the tangential products have been very, very strong. I just wanted to ask a little bit about the broadening out by client type. So, Ali, you alluded to the fact that you're seeing kind of broader institutional use of the product. I wanted to just ask about kind of what inning that's in, in your view? And then, are you seeing any increasing competitive pressure just given the success of the product and some of the new product launches that have come to market?

Hey, Mike, thanks for the question. So first, on the institutional side of things, look, I think we're very, very early days. I'm not sure what inning we're in. Maybe we're in pretty warm spring trading. I'm not sure. We're just we're starting. If you look at the RFP pipeline from a percentage growth perspective, across the board for us, at least, it's up quite significantly, 30%, 40%, high 40%s-type around the world on average. So, we see that. We see consultants giving us more and more upgrades and more positive momentum. I think when we're -- us looking at it, we've never had as many positive buy ratings or whatever the equivalent is on our strategies at the firm. So, things are just starting, I would say. And look, we certainly hope we can deliver on growth in the institutional landscape. For us, again, the most important part is that we are delivering for our clients and they're starting to vote with their feet. But I think it's very, very early days on that front. From a competitive perspective, we're not really seeing a lot of pressure from a competitive perspective on fees or anything like that. Look, this is a very competitive environment. We have very able competitors. Everybody is scrapping in a business that isn't growing very well, right? We're all very proud of our organic growth rate, but remember, it's still in the very, very low single-digit numbers. So, it's a fight. And we certainly want to deliver the best we can for our clients to get there. I will give you the example very specifically around some ETF launches that we've had. And we continue to deliver on what our clients' needs are. And this industry is like any other industries, like your industries, like any industry, if you deliver on what your clients want, they will pay fair and reasonable prices for it. If you're delivering something that they don't want or you fail, then you have pressure. And so, it's, again, the whole team effort for us to come together and deliver for our clients. And in that manner, hopefully keep them happy and keep our rates fair.

Our final question today comes from Michael Cyprys from Morgan Stanley. Michael, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for squeezing me in here. Just wanted to come back to a comment, Ali, you made about innovation at the core of Janus Henderson's corporate strategy. I was hoping maybe you could talk about how you're thinking about and investing in technology to enhance your investment engine and support alpha generation. How do you see that evolving in the near term versus looking out more longer-term?

So, thanks for the question. We, as we've mentioned before and you saw some of the results in Q4, continue to invest in the business, both from a technology perspective, but also from a people perspective, from a seed capital perspective and otherwise. When it comes to specifically on technology, we have a team that is -- they have day jobs, but we have a team that comes together and thinks about disruptive financial technologies, or DFT, a shout out to them if they're listening to this call, really thoughtful group of folks who keep an eye on what's going on externally, not just in our industry, but in other industries and bring that to bear within our organization. And they bring it to bear really in three big buckets. One, exactly as you described it, is how can we make more efficient, make more productive, deliver better results for clients on the investment process side of things, ingesting a lot of data or getting quicker access to information, et cetera. The second piece that we have is investing on how to best serve our clients, how do we understand our clients better. I mentioned this earlier on and what's going on in U.S. intermediary and one of the partnerships that we have there is to understand what client needs are, what advisers' needs are, so we don't waste their time, but we target and are able to deliver on what their needs are, so client service. And then the last one is what we call internally, how do we 10 times our people. We firmly believe that technologies like AI will help our people to do better and be more efficient. And human plus AI is better than AI alone. And so, that's somewhere we're investing as well. So across the board, not just AI, but broad technology, those are the areas we're investing in. And look, you've seen that in our P&L. When Roger releases the purse strings a little bit, he looks for ROI, but the ROI is there, and we continue to deliver on that.

And maybe just on that latter point on AI, maybe we could just double-click on that for just a moment. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're using and thinking about using generative AI and LLM tools across the organization? I think you mentioned an RFP use case broadly. How many use cases have you guys identified? How do you see that evolving in terms of putting them into production over the next year or two? And as you think about over the near to medium term, what -- how meaningful could this be to top- versus bottom-line results?

So, we're early days, less than a handful of things that are actually in production or being used right now, I would say. We clearly, like -- frankly, everybody else has their own version of a ChatGPT or we call it ChatJHI. We have those types of tools that are there for sure. So, I don't really count that. But things like the RFP tool, and that team has worked tirelessly in improving that. I mean the good news is that we have capacity constraints on our RFP team. And so, if we can give them tools to improve the speed and accuracy, at least with the first cut of RFPs, that's something that has been quite meaningful. And so, that is something. Thanks for noting it in the prepared remarks that we mentioned, we think that has a lot of opportunity to help 10 times our people. But I mentioned also work that's going on, for example, in the intermediary world. So, we have an AI-powered distribution intelligence platform, which looks at taking insights from the data that we have to enhance productivity, to drive growth, to understand, again, who to target and who to not waste time of because they're not interested in products X, Y or Z, but we can actually bring them product ABC that they're interested in and their clients' needs. So, we have good examples of that. It's tough. I don't want to dodge, I apologize. I just -- I don't really know dollars and cents-wise how impactful it's going to be. What I do know is that there's a clear need for extra productivity and capacity within our organization, and we're trying to provide that with some of these AI tools, and AI tools that something we're building internally, but a lot of them we're partnering externally with as well. I think everybody in the industry is probably thinking about this. And if not, they probably should.

We have no further questions. So, I'll hand the call back to Ali Dibadj for some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Adam. Just wanted to end by thanking our clients for entrusting us with their capital and the capital of the 60 million end clients that directly or indirectly rely on Janus Henderson. I want to thank everybody at Janus Henderson across the organization, whether you're in IT and ops working on AI or support functions or client groups or investments, these are a strong set of results. We're putting one foot in front of the other, as I've said a couple of times, internally and externally, and we want to deliver for our clients, our shareholders and all of our stakeholders. So, bye for now and talk to you next time.

This concludes today's call. Thank you very much for your attendance. You may now disconnect your lines.