Janus Henderson at Barclays Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Janus Henderson Group (NYSE:JHG) presented at the Barclays 23rd Annual Global Financial Services Conference. CEO Ali Dibadj outlined the company’s strategic focus on innovation and growth, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. The discussion centered on expanding market presence through strategic partnerships and a client-centric approach.

Key Takeaways

• Janus Henderson is focusing on innovation and strategic partnerships, like the Guardian Life partnership, to drive growth.
• The company is expanding its presence in the insurance sector, active ETFs, and alternative investments.
• Janus Henderson has seen eight consecutive quarters of inflows in its U.S. intermediary business.
• The company is the second-largest provider of tokenized funds globally, emphasizing its commitment to innovation.

Financial Results

Janus Henderson’s financial performance was bolstered by several key initiatives:

• The Guardian Life partnership increased assets from $45 billion to $46.5 billion.
• The insurance business manages approximately $100 billion in assets globally.
• The JAAA ETF is valued at $22 billion, with five fixed income ETFs each over $1 billion.
• The company reported 15 strategies with inflows exceeding $100 million last quarter.

Operational Updates

Operationally, Janus Henderson is making strides in several areas:

• The integration of Guardian Life is on track, with accretive margins expected next year.
• The launch of JABS, seeded with $100 million from Guardian Life, complements the JAAA ETF.
• The acquisition of Tabula in Europe aims to enhance ETF capabilities.
• Distribution channels outside the U.S. are being developed, mimicking the successful U.S. model.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, Janus Henderson has several strategic goals:

• Continue expanding active ETFs, particularly in fixed income and equities.
• Leverage the Tabula acquisition to broaden ETF offerings in Europe.
• Further develop the Privacore platform and expand Victory Park Capital beyond North America.
• Engage with more insurance companies to explore new opportunities.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, several key topics were addressed:

• Clients are seeking guidance amid geopolitical changes and opportunities in demographics and AI.
• The Guardian Life partnership was secured through long-term value creation, not lower pricing.
• The company is focusing on active equities, anticipating a market shift in that direction.
• Tokenized funds are seen as a growth area, providing access to innovative financial platforms.

In conclusion, Janus Henderson is poised for growth through innovation and strategic partnerships. For a deeper dive into the conference call, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 23rd Annual Global Financial Services Conference:

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to, I think, not quite our final session, but one of our final sessions of the day in here. I’m Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges. With us for this chat is Ali Dibadj, CEO of Janus Henderson Group plc.

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Hey, everybody.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Ali, thanks so much for being here. Welcome.

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. It’s always a great conference. I love Barclays every year doing bigger and better. Great leadership under Venkat. It’s great to see you.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Before maybe diving into some company-specific questions, can you talk a bit about how you see the macro backdrop currently? You know, where are you seeing the strongest investor appetite? What does this all mean for, you know, potentially for flows in the back half of the year?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah. So look, let me start. It’s clearly a very broad environment right now. I think what we’re seeing from clients is a few things, maybe three. One is that they’re very focused on needing help in terms of how to manage through this geopolitical environment. The geopolitics are changing every day. We don’t quite know what’s around the corner. They’re looking for help. They’re looking for help in finding things like real innovation. That’s something that we do at Janus Henderson. Our 350 investment professionals around the world have a focus on innovation. We try to deliver that between our small-cap and mid-cap portfolios. That’s something that a lot of our clients are looking for in terms of how to break through some of that geopolitical kind of question. They certainly look for non-US investing.

Emerging market debt has become quite popular among a lot of our client base, both on the private side. For us, that’s mostly on the Middle East side of things, but also on the public side as well, that we brought folks on board. Of course, more broadly around investing in non-US equities. We have European equities franchised. We have regional franchises as well. Really kind of the look at geopolitical and how it affects a lot of change in that marketplace. We think about that when we invest in real estate on our REIT side too. That’s one big question people ask. The second big question people ask is very much around demographics and lifestyle changes and AI. They really need help to try to figure out where opportunities lie.

That very much for our perspective, again, is directly aligned with how we think about our thematics for a broader sense of the word. We can find opportunities in health care and our biotech funds, as an example, that are growing quite well because there’s a specific expertise that we can bring to bear that is related to demographics and related to AI. Technology is another example of that for us. We look for transformation in technology. In fact, we just launched an ETF, which is the best of breed of all AI within one ETF called JHAI. It’s not just technology companies per se, but it’s the other picks and shovels, brick and mortar around that, electricity companies, other things that we have to bear. Investors are very much looking for that as well.

The last bucket, and it’s kind of more of a recent bucket, I’d say, obviously, is around the cost of capital. There are many implications of that. People are looking to see what’s happening with cost of capital. You are all thinking about it for sure. That leads to many things. It obviously leads to thinking through how wheat from chaff can be separated from a hedge fund perspective, a multi-strat perspective. Balanced funds, I think, are quite interesting right now, given that they give the return of fixed income because there is a cost of capital that’s there, as well as equities being able to pick wheat from chaff. Of course, the big question on people’s minds over the past several weeks for clients has been, OK, what happens to the fixed income desire right now?

We’re pretty clearly at the peak of a rate cycle, certainly in the U.S. We know that. I think some people expect three rate cuts over the course of this year. Our folks expect two. Look, either way, it’s certainly a lower rate environment than we have today. Perhaps not going back to historical zero levels, but certainly a lower rate environment is what folks are thinking through. What does that mean? What are the implications for us and for our clients? There are really two aspects to it. One is the rates are coming down for, I guess, the right reasons, but perhaps not the most preferential reasons, which is the economy is clearly slowing down. People will want things that are higher quality. Those are things like our AAA CLO ETFs, JAAA.

Those are things like our asset-backed privates, like Victory Park Capital, that we can bring to bear to our client base. That’s one area. The other area, not just the economy is concerning, so let’s be safer, is around duration. Perhaps not long term, depending on the curve shape, but certainly going from short term to mid term. That’s, again, the ecosystem of ETFs that we’ve provided, including JABS, which we just launched a little bit later in terms of duration along the way. I guess there’s a lot of uncertainty out there in the marketplace. That’s our bread and butter. That’s your bread and butter. It’s a lot of the bread and butter of the folks in this audience. People are looking for answers. The good news is, for 91 years, we’ve been delivering answers to our clients in some form.

Again, trying to look at this macro-economic environment as an opportunity is certainly what’s been playing out for us.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. All right. Let’s dig into the business a little bit more, maybe starting with your partnership with Guardian Life, which was announced recently. This meaningfully scales your insurance and fixed income AUM. Maybe talk a little bit about the background of the transaction. Was it a competitive process? Why did Guardian choose Janus Henderson?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Sure. Yeah, happy to talk about it. We are very pleased about this partnership. Yes, it was a competitive process. You can imagine all the folks who were involved in the competitive process, all the big names who were out there. We did not win this process because we were lower price, lower fee in the short term for sure. We know we weren’t. We were certainly, I think, more predisposed to suggest a long-term value creation than some others. It really starts off, Ben, because Guardian Life and Janus Henderson Group plc have a very similar culture. That’s a culture of innovation. They are creating, want to create the insurance company of the future, a modern insurance company.

We are Janus Henderson, all 2,000 people around the firm, trying to create the asset management company of the future in terms of innovation, in terms of bringing new products to bear, et cetera. That melding of the minds was actually quite essential to us. On top of that, we brought together the incentivization. We are very much aligned. They have warrants in us. Effectively, they’re exposed to the equity. They see the opportunity for us to grow their business in partnership with them. Just to take a little bit of a step back, the partnership has effectively four aspects to it that we find quite interesting. One, which everybody focuses on a lot, and obviously, it’s a big number, so I get it, is the originally $45 billion of assets we were going to get from the general account, which is an IMA form. They grow.

We certainly knock on wood for all of us, hope that they continue to grow. It came in at $46.5 billion. I don’t expect that same type of growth, but we certainly expect them to grow. That’s, again, classic general account, fixed income, mostly investment grade, but some high-yield public exposure that we can get at accretive margins to our average margin once we are fully integrated kind of sometime next year. That’s a big part of it that people mostly pay attention to. There are other elements that we find extraordinarily interesting and I think were things that we have been told we can uniquely bear to not just Guardian Life, but other players as well, one of which is the $400 million of seed capital that we had partnered on with them.

The whole point of the seed capital is for them to give us access to their needs for the general account and seed things that, in theory, they could use and that others could use as well. In fact, we just used $100 million to invest in JABS, which is very much of a complement to JAAA. JAAA is floating rate, AAA CLOs. JABS isn’t quite as high quality, but in the kind of A range, I’d argue. It is a little bit longer duration and a more fixed rate to complement JAAA. That’s something that Guardian wants for the balance sheet. They’re giving us $100 million to seed it. Over time, we’re going to bring that to other insurance companies, particularly when it’s NAC rated, hopefully, and bring that to grow that business. That’s part of the $400 million element to it.

We’ve taken on board their people who are doing fantastically well within our organization, particularly the corporate credit team is doing really, really well and adding value to us. We think we can take that team and expand them in terms of the assets that they manage from other insurance companies, particularly in the U.S., because Guardian is an extraordinarily well-viewed insurance company. It’s an insurance company that others say, hey, wait a second. If Janus Henderson can do this for them, why can’t they do something like that for us? That’s something that we’re certainly building up with this team. Last but certainly not least, Guardian has something called Park Avenue Securities. It’s close to $60 billion of assets under management. It’s a captive distribution system, 2,400 people who are financial advisors there.

With new leadership at Park Avenue Securities, a gentleman named Mike Perry, who we’ve known, people on our team know him for a very long time and actually are very focused with him on growing the business. He’s very aligned with this. He’s really kind of a trendsetter in the industry. We want to partner with him. We look forward to it. Growing our business in the Park Avenue Securities fold as well as Park Avenue Securities grows is another element of the story. There are several kind of multifaceted, I guess we said in the press release, tentacles to this. We’re quite excited so far about the progress here, JABS being just one example.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. You answered a few of my other questions here, but maybe just another high-level question. Outside of Guardian Life, can you talk a bit about your broader insurance business and unpack your ambitions here? You mentioned, I think, that some conversations are picking up. What does the pipeline look like? Is there a cadence we can expect with new partnerships, any color along those lines?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, thanks for that. To be clear, we don’t have exclusivity from Guardian through the opportunity to talk to other insurance companies. The conversations we’re having are conversations we’ve never had before with really large insurance companies around the world. We say, wait a second, there’s something interesting here. This is not an outsource my general account to some of the characters out there who can outsource. This is not a private equity-led general account business that I can just give it to and kind of may have questions about. This is something that really suits my needs. We’re having real conversations. I would talk about maybe a dozen or so conversations that we’ve had out there. Just to be super clear, I’m not sure if any one of them will get to anywhere, just to be clear about this.

We’re having conversations with people we’ve never had before in the insurance landscape. That’s partly because we’re now on the radar screen. We are about $100 billion in assets under management just from insurance around the world. That’s meaningful. That’s 15th or 16th in the world right now. We’re on the radar screen. We’re doing things that are creative. We’re doing things that are growing. People want to have access to our ecosystem and our improved skill sets from an investment perspective as well. By the way, to your earlier question, that’s something Guardian really wanted, is an opportunity to have better returns for their policyholders by getting access to some of the skill sets that we have. Securitize is just one example of this.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: All right. Maybe pivoting to ETFs.

You’ve seen a lot of success in the active fixed income side in particular. Maybe just start, can you give us a bit of an update on JAAA, JABS? Do you think this new one could be as big as JAAA? How are sales looking?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, look, so JAAA has been a great success for us. It continues to grow quite well. Candidly, and you know me, some folks in the audience know me, and the way we operate, we were watching this like a hawk, both back in the liberation days of April, but also more recently when it was becoming clearer and clearer that rates road had come down. Everything acted exactly as we expected. In particular, we’ve seen no slowdown in information as public. We’ve seen no slowdown in flows into JAAA. The exciting part to it, though, is that if we look at the other four ETFs, we have five in total, the other four ETFs on the fixed income side that are over $1 billion, we’ve seen the pace of growth of those being faster than what JAAA was at that same time of growth.

To be clear, to set expectations, JAAA, I think, was a confluence of, candidly, luck and other things that got us to that level. It certainly suggests that the growth rate of these other ETFs is clearly on the right path. JABS is a great example of that. We don’t expect it to be as big as a $22 billion ETF. We do expect it to be complementary to JAAA, again, floating rate versus fixed rate, a little bit longer duration. We do think it’s in the same conversation there. What we definitely want to do is continue to grow the $5 billion active ETFs that we have on the fixed income side. We’re delivering an ecosystem.

A little bit to your macro question earlier on, we’re delivering an ecosystem so that if a client has a particular view about rates and about credit ratings and everything else that they want, we have that product for them. We’re not going to do all things to all people. We have a broader range of products across the board in an environment where the market may change from a credit perspective and a rating perspective.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: You kind of touched on my next question here. With short-term rates increasingly likely to come down, that’s your house view as well, how do you anticipate changes in demand for these products or maybe across the fixed income franchise more broadly? What would your expectations be?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a question we’ve been analyzing quite a bit. From a JAAA perspective, we would have anticipated that people are looking for other opportunities that perhaps have a little bit of a longer duration to it. What you’re finding with JAAA is not only is it the high-quality element that people are attracted to, but also the spread is quite attractive. If the underlying cash, let’s call it, return rate comes down, the spread that JAAA gives you is actually quite attractive on a relative basis. People are still sticking to it. To the point, we have a wide gamut of ETFs in the fixed income landscape that we think people can use depending on what they want. If they want a little bit longer duration, they can go from half a year JAAA to something closer to three-ish years on JMBS.

They can go to a JSI or JABS, which has about a year type plus duration. By the way, even if they want short duration, but they’re concerned about the U.S., we have a great product called VNLA, V-N-L-A, which is another billion-dollar ETF for us, which is short duration but global as well, if people are concerned about what’s there. Our point within the ETF category is to create an ecosystem of products on the fixed income side where people can actually articulate, express their views through our vehicles. It’s not just a product. It’s a set of products that people can articulate their views on. We’re using JAAA, so far the most successful one of them. That’s effectively a cross-sell tool and a wedge to show we have the right to play in this area. We have the investment chops to play in this area.

We can service you and operationalize your ETFs better than anybody else in the world. That’s how we’ve become the second largest fixed income active ETF provider in the world. We’re the eighth largest active ETF provider, period, around the world. Right now, we’re, as you said, very focused on fixed income. Even in this change of rate cycles, we think we have the products to deliver.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: How do you see demand evolving for ETFs? I mean, I think you guys have talked about seeing a pickup from insurers, institutions which have traditionally been less allocated in the retail channel. You’ve got Tabula, which I think in Europe, the penetration is even a bit lower. Where are you seeing a lot of this demand come from? It seems like in the past many years, it’s been a lot of retail advisory. What are you seeing from more institutional-like clients?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, so if you think of the way our trajectory of most of our ETFs have gone in the U.S., and it’s a little bit different than Europe, which I’ll touch on, on the fixed income ETF side, at least, it started very much from RIAs wanting access to this. In fact, institutions saying, no, I don’t want access. I’ve got my CLO investors already in-house, et cetera, or my CLO provider. It went from actually RIAs to then wirehouses to then models. Comically, perversely, those institutions saying, I don’t want any, came back and said, wait a second. You can do BBB CLOs for me at 30-something basis points. You’re giving me liquidity both at the underlying. I get that it’s BBB and there’s less liquidity, but you’re giving me liquidity there and liquidity from a market perspective now that you’re a billion dollars.

You’re seeing a lot of this flow coming from institutional as well and models as an element to that. In Europe, it’s a little bit different. This is why we picked up Tabula, which is a very heterogeneous market. Could we have built something like a Tabula, which is an ETF specialist? I guess we could have, but it would have taken three or four years. Instead, we brought on board a fantastic group of individuals who are market makers, know the market makers at least, know how to communicate and sell the product in 15 countries around Europe and on 10 to 12 different exchanges as well. Those are disproportionately on the institutional side from a client base perspective and starting to go to intermediary. U.S., it’s intermediary going to institutional. In Europe, it’s institutional going to intermediary. You mentioned this a second ago.

Yes, it’s absolutely lower penetrated in Europe. If you effectively time-shift Europe to get back seven or so years, you’re seeing even faster growth in adoption of active ETFs in Europe and of ETFs more broadly than you did in the U.S. Candidly, we were behind the eight ball in the U.S. Now we’ve caught up gladly. We want to continue to do that, not just in fixed income, but in equities as well in the U.S. In Europe, we don’t want to be behind the eight ball. We’re certainly not. You’re seeing several hundreds of millions of dollars of flows even just over the past, call it, year or so since we’ve picked up Tabula.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Maybe one last question on ETFs just on the equity side, which you just alluded to. I think earlier this year, you launched a fundamental large-cap equity ETF. A lot of the growth in active ETFs has come from things other than that, income-generating strategies using covered calls, levered ETFs on single stocks. Maybe talk a bit about your plans on the equity side of the ETF business. How are you thinking about new strategies, new wrappers for existing strategies, new things altogether? How are you thinking about the growth there?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, it’s a very important question because I think what you’re seeing, generally speaking, on the active equities landscape is almost a Hail Mary for a lot of folks. Gosh, I have a product. It happens to be a mutual fund right now. It happens to be CIT. It happens to be SMA, whatever it is. It’s not growing. Maybe if I stick it into ETF, it’ll grow. It’s an undifferentiated business. Let me stick it into ETF. Effectively cloning. That’s not what we’re doing. For us, from an equities perspective, we have a long, long history of being very good investors. Just look at our AUM, percentage of AUM that’s outperforming or beating our peers. We have a long history of actually delivering alpha from an equities perspective. We have differentiated product.

We can take pieces of the differentiated products or amplify, as we call it, built adjacencies to the differentiated products and go into the equities side on the active ETF side of things. I think it’s a first off, a lot of folks just clone. A lot of folks just say, look, it’s undifferentiated here. Maybe the wrapper makes it differentiated. We don’t think that’s the case at all. We’re taking our differentiated skill sets and applying that into the ETF wrapper because it’s something that the clients want to ingest. JXX is a great example of this. If you are trying to express a view of getting exposure to transformational businesses, JXX is perfect. We have a track record as part of a large-cap growth profile.

JHAI, if you want exposure to AI, but not just the technology element to it, the broader ecosystem of AI, JHAI is a great strategy to get into. The PM sits in the middle of Silicon Valley and knows everything that’s going on there, as well as other parts of the world that inputs into that. We’ve also had great success on the equity side on more of our quantamental pieces of active equity ETFs. JMID, JSmall, JSMID, that’s been there too. Similarly, in Europe on equities, we found real interest in our best ideas of Europe equities, so concentrated European equities, as well as in Japan. The common thread in all these things is we’re creating an ecosystem where a client can express their views through a structure that they can actually, in a very efficient manner, take on board for them.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. All right. Maybe let’s switch gears a little bit. Your overall flows, I think you’ve seen eight consecutive quarters of inflows in the U.S. Maybe talk a bit about what’s going well here. Then outside the U.S., what do you think needs to happen to see the flow profile improve?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, look, we’re putting one foot in front of the other as best as we can in the U.S. A big driver of those flows, three consecutive quarters, was the U.S. intermediary business, so the retail business. We have been very deliberate about how to improve that business and using the same thought processes to apply outside the U.S. as well, where it’s a little bit harder to get some of these things done. You’ll get a sense of that when I start describing what we did in the U.S., just because things take time. Regulatory perspective, et cetera, take time. In the U.S., what did we do? We’re applying it. What did we do? Number one, we had to make sure we had the right people in place. We were not shy in changing people. We continue to be not shy in changing people when we need to.

It wasn’t just changing a significant portion of the wholesalers. It was also making sure that there are specialists involved. It was also making sure that the leader of the group, who we pulled over from a very strong competitor, probably the best distribution system in the U.S. competitor, drove that business and improved that. People was the first aspect to it. The second aspect to it is we kind of touched on a little bit just a second ago, which is we had to make sure that the product was the right set of products. We still think there’s enormous opportunity for mutual funds for Janus Henderson in the U.S. We have killer performance. We’re significantly smaller scale than some of the players out there who are much bigger than us. We’re slowly chipping away at that when performance is good. There, we have really great mutual fund products.

We also had to make sure that we had the right products, for example, in ETF form. We brought that forward. We had to make sure we had the right products in alternatives. Privacore, which is our alternative specialist area, we can certainly talk about more if you’d like, is an area from a distribution perspective we had to make sure we had the right product set. We then had to make sure that the incentive compensation is right. We historically had an incentive compensation that rewarded, for lack of a better word, stagnation or consistency. We are now rewarding growth. That’s something that we’re very, very focused on. People have to grow their business. Lastly, we had to make sure that the processes were right.

We ingest right now in North America a significant amount of data to be able to predict where we want to make the next call, where we want to make the next move. If you take all of those and think about how to apply that outside the U.S., some of those will be easier to come by than not. You’re seeing that in our results where you’re just starting to see some improvement. For example, the data in the U.S. is different than the data in Asia or the data in Europe. We don’t have the same level of data just as an industry. We’re trying to figure out how to create that, how to anticipate that. You can’t quite compensate and incentivize people in the same way. We’re trying to figure out how to do that. Things are a little bit kind of taking longer to get there.

What I will say is if you think about the successes we’ve seen in the U.S., we’re starting to see that bear fruit, for example, in the intermediary channel in continental Europe, which consistently has been growing and improving. Last quarter, it wasn’t, but over time, it has. The UK is still a struggle for us. There, we’re taking time to think through how to improve that. APAC, we’re seeing improvement. Australia, we’re seeing improvement. You’re seeing things shift. To be very, very clear, and I’ve said this a ton of times, I don’t want people to get over their skis. Not everything is working well. We’re probably in the fourth-ish, maybe fifth-ish inning as a firm. There are clear proof points that we’re putting one firm in front of the other. We’re applying the same expertise.

We’re applying the same processes and tweaking them where we have to to get to some of that growth. That’s not just the U.S. intermediary that’s eight quarters of strong performance and flows. Perhaps it starts trends at other parts of the company as well.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Speaking of other challenging parts of the business or really most of the businesses in your industry, active equities have been quite tough despite a pretty constructive backdrop for equities in general over the past few years. I mean, what does it take to buck the trend?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, look, I started talking about this a second ago. I think that right now is a really interesting time for our clients because they’re realizing and noticing that passive isn’t the answer to all problems. In fact, when there is such volatility, you need to be much more active in the way you construct your portfolios. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I don’t know who your guests are in the next couple of days, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every single one of the large passive players out there, and you know them, everybody knows them, all of them are talking about active. Not a single one, as they project their growth forward, is thinking about passive as a big driver of their growth. It’s all thinking about active.

Gladly, we’ve been doing that for 91 years, and we have a pretty good track record at Janus Henderson. I actually think that there’s a really interesting turning point that we’ve all thought about and talked about, which is actually starting to happen, which is a shift to active equities. We typically see any shift in the asset management industry, as you well know, starting from the most sophisticated sort of sovereign wealth funds and pension plans, trickling down effectively to family offices, ultra net worth, then to intermediary. We’re seeing that happen, and for us, we’re seeing wins along those lines. Last quarter, for example, we had 15 strategies that were inflowing more than $100 million each. Four or five of those were active equities strategies, and we expect that to continue to grow and to burgeon.

We have great performance in our small and mid-cap businesses, in our large-cap businesses, on our European equities businesses, on our non-US equities businesses, our global small-cap businesses reaping benefits. We’re seeing a lot of folks, again, to your first question, look for help, look for wheat from chaff separation, look for real drivers of company performance, company-specific performance that’ll buck the trend of any of these large macro negative trends like geopolitics and everything else. We’re, so far, being the beneficiary of that. We want to continue to do that. We don’t think active equities, in any sense, is a forlorn place or a place you want to stay away from. We are leaning into it, and we think this world is more and more ripe for folks like us to deliver on that.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. Why don’t we move over to alternatives?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Sure.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Maybe first, you mentioned Privacore. Would you mind giving us an update there? What does the current distribution footprint look like? What does the current product offering look like?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mentioned Privacore a little bit ago. Just to kind of put some new faces in the audience around what Privacore actually is, Privacore is a best-in-class platform for open architecture, alternative distribution, and wealth. That’s a mouthful. I apologize. Hopefully, you get the picture of what that is. It basically sits between GPs and wealth platforms. Wealth platforms want to get differentiated, high-performing privates or alternatives asset managers onto their platforms. Just because you put it on a platform doesn’t mean the financial advisor takes that. In fact, lots of stuff gets put on platforms and doesn’t sell a lick. We are here. They asked us to be here. Our clients did. Many of our forward-thinking clients asked us to build this thing on the Janus Henderson backbone so that when something gets on their platform that’s alternatives, the financial advisors can be educated.

The financial advisors can be helped in terms of what part of the allocation it should be or shouldn’t be for what types of clients. That’s effectively what Privacore does for the wealth manager. On the other side, the GP, and we’ve all talked about this. You’ve all heard about this, the democratization of alternatives. Some people can do it. Maybe ranked by AUM, numbers one through five of alternative managers can actually build a sales force of 100 people to then go sell to the financial advisors. Most of them, call it numbers six through, I don’t know, 50, can’t do it, but sometimes have extraordinarily strong performance that is differentiated and, again, have no way to get to the wealth platforms. That’s what Privacore does. It selects a bunch of folks.

We have 97 people on the waiting list right now, 97 general partners or asset management firms in the alt world waiting list to get on this platform. We’re not going to do it to everybody. We’re going to not just look at the economics, but the performance. We’re going to bring that onto Privacore. We’re going to distribute that to the wealth platforms. To answer your very specific question, we are growing in terms of the wirehouses who see the value of this. We’re in the handful now. Candidly, if you get to north of the handful, you basically covered the landscape of folks who want to use this. More and more RIAs are looking at this as a tool because all of them are incentivized for the appropriate reasons to increase alternatives as a % of the allocation of their clients.

These things need to be sold, not just bought. That’s what Privacore does. From a distribution perspective, it’s more and more. From a product perspective, there’s tons of stuff that’s out there from a public domain perspective. We’ve been quite successful with a big technology fund out there. Hundreds of millions of dollars of money raised. We’ve been quite successful with a private equity business that we’ve raised money for. We now have infrastructure on the platform. We also have a curated kind of building block of private credit and private equity where it’s our name on the front. We, with a partner, select what is the best vintage and can rotate that around depending on what the performance is. We’re starting to just develop the products. It’s something that we’ve had for 24 months, roughly two years. It’s a de novo build.

We’re just starting to see the progress here. So far, we feel pretty good about what we’re seeing.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Similar question on your other alternatives assets, Victory Park Capital, National Bank of Kuwait, and maybe more broadly, these roll acquisitions. How do you think about growing that business? Does more tuck in M&A make sense? Is there a lot of organic growth opportunity as you see it with what you have? How do you think about growing that out?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, so let’s just think through our M&A trajectory broadly. Most of that was on the private side. The first thing, I’ve been here for about three years at Janus Henderson. The first thing was an emerging market debt business, the public fixed income emerging market debt business we brought on board, not on the alt side. That was the first kind of lift-in, so to speak, of a really great business with a fantastic track record, which is adjusting their three-year track record, I think, this month. We anticipate a lot more growth from the $1.5 to $2 billion that it already has in AUM. To your point, we went down the path of the alternatives. Our thesis was that there are three areas of alternatives that we really want to be in. Those are the areas that were not picked over.

Those are the areas that we thought we could differentiate. Again, to our DNA, to create alpha, not just beta on the private credit side. One of them we mentioned is Privacore, de novo build, but a JV with a great team we brought over from Blackstone to build that business. As we said a second ago, it feels like that’s starting to build some momentum. We hope for more of it there. To your very point, we went in other directions as well. We brought on board, on the ETF side, a team from Tabula. That’s an alternative. I won’t spend too much time on that. That allows us to build ETFs in UCITS form, which is not just a European business, but basically everywhere in the world except Australia and the U.S. business. Asia, Latin America, Middle East, of course, Europe wants ETFs in UCITS forms.

That’s something that we bought with that skill set. As I mentioned, market makers, 15 countries, distribution skill sets, product development skill sets, really great people, et cetera, et cetera. We went into more of the alt area in a spin-out of National Bank of Kuwait that had a really great team there for almost two decades in the Middle East, basically Turkey to Morocco, doing private credit deals for the most part. We brought that on board. It is a unique opportunity to be in a fast-growing business where the sovereign wealth funds have trouble doing $20 and $30 million checks because it’s just not worth their time. They’re happy to allocate somebody else doing it, particularly if it invests locally, which we do. The banks are not doing the $20 million and $30 million checks there because they are not necessarily as sophisticated as that.

That has been going well. Spun into us, we call it Janus Henderson Emerging Market Privates. It is spun into us. The team is raising money as we anticipated. We see demand there, not just in the Middle East, but broadly as well. The most recent acquisition that we made is Victory Park Capital. That decision was one that we went down the path of owning private credit because our clients were asking for it. It is effectively a complement to our public credit businesses, particularly on the securitized side. We looked at basically the two branches of private credit. One is direct lending and two is asset-backed. On the direct lending side of things, we had trouble seeing it as not too beta at this point in the cycle.

At this point, the incredible amount of money being thrown into that marketplace for a limited amount of deals, let us just say, makes us cautious. We are going to hold off on that in the U.S. from a direct lending perspective, although there might be some outside the U.S. that we go for. What we found was asset-backed is essentially direct lending 15 years ago. There is real offer creation, real differentiation, real origination, real diligence happening at the level. There are really a few companies that we looked at. We bought, frankly, the best one. All the other ones were bought. There was Apollo that has been doing this for a while. We bought what we think is the best one. We are continuing to grow Victory Park Capital.

We see enormous potential there, not just as an asset-backed business in North America, which is where it is based. It is based in Chicago, but also as we complement it with our own securitized business as well, the public asset-backed area, and also complement that with Privacore and Janus Henderson, for example, the interval fund that we just filed for and soon will launch. We continue to see these things perform as we thought they were going to perform. As you know, as we have mentioned before on these earnings calls, we do a ton of work to try to make sure these are client-led acquisitions. We de-risk these things. We do not just buy to check the box. We make sure clients want something. We go find the best thing. We pair that up. It feels like, so far, those are going OK.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. With our last bit of time here, I’m always curious to ask about blockchain and tokenization and what you’re doing there. You’ve got a couple of tokenized funds in the market, a treasury fund, a tokenized version of JAAA. Can you talk about where the investor interest in those is coming from? Is it a new customer channel that’s opening up? I’ll just wrap both into one since we’ve got about a minute and a half left. A number of your peers have talked about tokenization technology, not just as a wrapper, but as a new back-end rail. Do you see opportunities elsewhere to implement blockchain in more than just a tokenized version of?

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Yeah, so I’ll try to be very efficient in my answer, given your prompt on timing. First off, from a tokenization perspective, something people don’t know, we are the second largest provider of tokenized funds in the world. No one knows this. I guess now you do. It’s one of the things that, for us, is a little bit of an experiment for the second part of your question, but also is getting us involved with a whole set of clients that we never would have had access to. That client, to your specific question, is disproportionately on-chain financial institutions who would have been OK investing in stablecoin when there was no interest, when there was no yield. Now, in the past little while, they’re looking for things that have yield. JAAA and U.S. Treasuries is a place they want to go. They want to stay on chain.

That’s what we can provide for them with our partnership with Animo and Centrifuge and Grove as well. That’s something that we think that we’re able to get ahead of our peers on because we can learn about it. Now, to your second part of your question, we are seeing some other institutions who are off-chain get interested and involved in this stuff. I think we’re all learning. It may take time for tokenization to change the rails, to change how we actually do business. We want to be there when it happens. We’re preparing ourselves as opposed to saying, look, at this point, it’s going to change or it’s actually changing already. We want to be ahead of the game. Again, Janus Henderson, although we’re 91 years old, we are effectively a startup that’s 91 years old in the way we think about things. We want to be innovative.

Not everything will be successful. Whether it be our ETFs, whether it be tokenized funds, whether it be new geographies that we go to, we want to continue to build the asset management company of the future. That’s what we’re dedicated to doing on behalf of our shareholders and our clients.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: Great. We’re out of time. We have to leave it there. Ali, what a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much.

Ali Dibadj, CEO, Janus Henderson Group plc: Thank you. Great to see you again, Ben.

Ben Budish, Analyst, Barclays: See you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.