Good morning.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to reflect today on the progress ICG has made during the first half.

This is an even more exciting than usual results announcement. We're not only reporting impressive H1 results, we're also announcing a major distribution agreement and strategic partnership with Amundi.

From a group perspective, our growing breadth and scale is continuing to drive visible benefits for our clients and shareholders. Our deliberate tilt over the last decade towards higher returning strategies is clearly bearing fruit.

Our track record and reputation for an unwavering focus on risk and investment performance are key factors in our recent success. Institutional clients are increasingly scrutinizing performance, and in particular, realized performance, or DPI.

In a market where a number of players' pursuit of AUM and volume is leading to some unreasonable risk-taking, in our view, predominantly, but not exclusively, in credit and private debt, our clients recognize that we remain, at heart, investors squarely focused on consistency of performance through cycles. All of which means that we see substantial opportunity to grow our existing strategies and our institutional client base.

This will drive significant organic growth in the coming years. We are also well positioned, strategically and financially, to continue to innovate new strategies and products where we see opportunities.

These strong growth prospects are further enhanced by the announcement today of our strategic partnership with Amundi, which is a meaningful step forward in the development of our wealth strategy and will help shape appropriate product offerings for that market. It's an incredibly exciting opportunity, potentially very additive to both parties, and I'll speak about it further later in this presentation.

I'll start with a few highlights on the last 6 months. Fundraising of $9 billion surpassed our expectations coming into the year, with Europe IX raising more quickly than we had anticipated and Infrastructure II having a very strong run into its final close, achieving hard cap at more than double the size of the previous vintage.

Our secondaries franchise continues to excite us, an area we have built entirely organically and which is now our third largest asset class by AUM. We are in the market with the subsequent vintage of LP secondaries, vintage II.

We are launching a European evergreen secondaries vehicle, and we are also launching a mid-market version of our strategic equity fund, which is our GP-led secondaries strategy, in order to further cement our global leadership position in that asset class. On the financial side, fee-earning AUM now stands at $84 billion, up 6% in the last 6 months on a constant currency basis, and we have substantial dry powder to continue our investment programs.

Management fees for the 6 months were up 16% at £334 million, while expenses are being well managed and demonstrating operating leverage. At a group level, our operating cash flow was up meaningfully at £450 million.

In short, we're enjoying significant growth and cash flow generation. Putting that into a longer-term perspective, you can see how our business has evolved rapidly over the last 5 years and the financial impact that's having.

On the left-hand side of this chart, we set out our growth by asset class, which has been diversified, but really driven by higher return strategies in structured capital, secondaries, and real assets equity. Private debt, in comparison, has grown, but at a slower pace and remains an area where we continue to be highly disciplined, prioritizing long-term performance over aggressive deployment.

We have attracted substantial capital into these higher returning strategies, leading to almost doubling our fee-earning AUM over the past 5 years, entirely organically. We have grown our weighted average management fee rate from 85 bps at March '21 to just under 1% today.

As a result, we are larger, more diversified, more resilient, and more profitable. A key theme of our strategy has been scaling our higher return strategies, specifically private equity secondaries, structured capital, real assets equity, that's real estate equity and infrastructure equity.

This takes time, but the successful execution of this is clearly visible in the middle of this page. In March '21, these strategies represented a third of our fee-earning.

Since then, they have grown by 3.2 times, that's compared to doubling of fee-earning AUM at the group level, and today they represent 57% of our fee-earning AUM. From a purely financial perspective, this has been the key driver of the growth in our management fee rate I just spoke about, and of course our operating margin.

The broader rationale is arguably more important. These strategies are inherently more complex, with higher barriers to entry, and this allows us to differentiate, generate outperformance for our clients, demonstrate our investment excellence, and in the process, charge higher management fees on committed capital as well as generate, over time, more performance fees.

These strategies are also harder to commoditize, which will help protect management fee rates and is reinforcing ICG's brand equity with our clients. These are not volume vanilla products.

What is particularly exciting is that all of these funds, or strategies, have significant room to grow organically for years to come. As a result of this shift, the future value of our fee-earning AUM is materially higher than 5 years ago.

It is earning higher fees and is more relevant to clients' wider markets portfolios. Today, we are proud of our European heritage and of our global reach.

We have presence in 18 countries, attract capital from clients around the world, and invest in all the largest geographies for private markets, including a quarter of our deployed capital being invested in the US. From a product perspective, we have a number of leading positions in structured capital, GP-led secondaries, European direct lending, as well as an exciting array of earlier-stage strategies, including in real assets.

This has not been by chance. It is anchored in some very basic beliefs about what it takes to succeed in the long term, which is: one, a focus on investment performance, always; two, a forefront of strategies that provides something different to clients; and three, a platform that is scalable to be relevant to the largest investors globally.

I'm proud that today's results show how we are continuing to build that at ICG, how they help underline the success of that execution to date, and how they help demonstrate the opportunity ahead of us. Turning now to the current environment.

Fundraising across the wider market remains challenging. Global private capital raised this year is likely to be lower for the fourth consecutive year, and to quote a recent Bain report, fundraising has never been so hard.

The statistic that there's about $3 of demand for every dollar likely to be raised is remarkable. It has existential consequences for many managers, some of whom simply are not and will not be able to raise capital.

We're already seeing some firms effectively going into run-off or shrinking substantially, and I expect to see more of that. This will, incidentally, create some opportunities, at the very least for hiring new talent, and we are already benefiting.

One of the consequences of this is that LPs are increasingly selective, with many looking to diversify towards Europe and focusing both on certain strategies such as structured capital and real assets, as well as being very focused on investment performance and DPI in particular. For firms such as ICG who have a range of products and were able to raise capital, doing so is reinforcing our position with clients.

Stepping back, the real takeaway from this is that although the market has been challenging for a few years now, for firms such as ICG who have a range of products and are successfully raising capital, this is a very good time to differentiate, gain market share, and it is allowing us to set the firm up for even greater long-term success and growth. I mentioned the strong focus of investors on realized performance, or DPI, how quickly we return cash to clients.

Here is a slide that I showed at our investor days in London, New York, and Tokyo this past September and October. This slide really resonates with our clients.

To have this number of strategies as top decile or at the very least top quartile from a DPI perspective is highly unusual. It's very impressive.

It's a track record we're incredibly proud of and a quantitative validation of how our focus on investment performance is delivering for clients. Importantly, this is not by chance, right?

It is not new to ICG. Our investors know this well.

Those of you who have known us for some time will have heard me speak about it many times in the past, how discipline in realizing assets, de-risking funds is key to consistency of performance over a long period. Discipline, a consistent focus on risk-return performance, not just return, this is what makes a real difference with investors today.

The result of all this is that we are continuing to see strong client demand, and that's reflected in our fundraising. We have raised $9 billion in the last 6 months, which is particularly noteworthy, not just because we have surpassed our expectations, but because, as we have previously indicated, we are, this year and next, at a structurally lower point of our own fundraising cycle.

Europe IX continues to raise well, with $2.8 billion raised in the period and the fund now standing at $7.5 billion, well on the way to meeting or exceeding the previous vintage, which was just over €8 billion. Infrastructure II held its final close in the period at €3.15 billion, so that's over two times larger than the prior vintage.

It has been a standout success. We had a re-up rate of 85% and attracted capital from a wide range of clients.

A quarter of the capital came from North America, that reinforcing the growing strength of our brand there and the appeal of high-performing European products for certain North American investors. From a shareholder perspective, we reduced the balance sheet commitment from €200 million in Fund I to €150 million in Fund II, moving from 13% of total fund size in the first vintage to under 5% in Fund II.

More broadly, over the past 15 months, we have had five funds close at or above their hard cap, and not just flagships, scaling strategies as well. In any environment that would be remarkable, but in this environment with fundraising under such pressure, as we discussed earlier, that's a real achievement.

All of which comes from and supports our client growth. We have continued to attract new institutional clients during the period.

Since we announced our fundraising guidance in May '24, 43% of new LPs came from North America and 9% from the Middle East. Looking ahead, we will continue to broaden our reach through innovating new products and diversifying our sources of capital, always with an absolute focus on developing products that are appropriate to those channels where we can deliver attractive investment returns.

Today, as part of that continued broadening of our client base, we're excited to announce a long-term strategic partnership with Amundi. This partnership significantly accelerates our ambitions in the private wealth space and combines ICG's investment expertise and track record of product innovation with Amundi's global distribution capabilities and structuring know-how.

We have historically taken a much more cautious approach to the wealth channel than most of our peers. While there's obviously an enormous potential for capital raising, we have also seen how it can shift investment priorities of GPs towards a more volume-driven approach to the detriment of performance, which is precisely at the opposite end of the spectrum of what ICG is about and what we want to be: uncompromisingly focused on investment quality, risk, and performance.

This is where the partnership with Amundi is incredibly exciting. We have found that we have a like-minded approach to investment, to delivering the best results for end clients.

We share key values, and this is essential for the success of our collaboration. Our common goal is to be an important force in shaping access for individuals to private markets investments while maintaining an unflinching focus on generating attractive risk-adjusted investment performance.

We see a significant long-term opportunity to develop a range of products appropriate to the wealth market and believe that together we have the right complementary capabilities to execute on that. I'm convinced that by working together in this way, we can create significant value for our clients and respective shareholders.

As you're well aware, Amundi is the largest European traditional asset manager, one of the largest globally, with some €2.3 trillion of assets under management and access through its distribution network to over 200 million individual clients. It is the ideal partner for ICG in this transaction, bringing scale, access, and expertise that are highly complementary to our own existing capabilities.

Looking at the two components of the partnership in a bit more detail. The commercial agreement, which covers distribution and product structuring, will have an initial term of 10 years.

Our immediate focus will be on developing and launching two evergreen funds, one for LP secondaries and one for private credit. Globally, outside of the US and Australia-New Zealand, Amundi will be the exclusive distributor in the wealth channel for ICG's evergreen and certain other products, with ICG being Amundi's exclusive provider for these products to Amundi's distribution business.

Over time, we will seek to develop more products and strategies that are well suited to the wealth market, and this is a very exciting long-term prospect of this partnership. We see a real opportunity to shape the market, to ensure that products are appropriate and deliver what investors are looking for, structured in ways that enable returns to be generated over the long term.

To align our interests and reinforce the long-term nature of this partnership, Amundi will acquire a 9.9% economic interest in ICG in a way that is non-dilutive to our current shareholders. The structure is set out in brief here and in more detail in the appendix and in the RNS we released this morning on this partnership.

As part of this, Amundi will be entitled to nominate one non-executive director to our board, and I look forward to working with that individual and the wider Amundi team to make a success of what I consider to be a meaningful alignment of two leading European-based firms to help shape the wealth market for private investments in the years to come. Looking ahead, our future growth has a number of encouraging tailwinds.

Our forefront of strategies is significantly exposed to some of the fastest-growing asset classes in private markets, providing a constructive background for our strategies. I'm very positive on the long-term opportunity ahead of us and our ability to execute on that, a trajectory that is reinforced by the results we are reporting today and the partnership with Amundi.

With that, I'll pass over to David.

Thank you, Benoit, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to report that we have published strong results this morning with growth across key financial metrics.

Fee-earning AUM grew 6% on a constant currency basis, ending at $84 billion. It has grown every year in the last 5 years in dollar terms, and over that period has increased at an annualized rate of 14%.

In the past 6 months, we have raised $5 billion for strategies that charge fees on committed capital and deployed $6 billion in strategies that charge fees on invested capital. We also have $19 billion of AUM not yet earning fees, largely in private debt, which has the potential to generate approximately £130 million in additional management fees.

Our visible recurring management fees remain the key driver of revenue growth. As of the 30th of September, management fees reached £334 million for the last 6 months, an increase of 16% year on year.

As we discussed in October, performance fees are becoming an important contributor to our revenue mix, reflecting the growth of higher return strategies that Benoit described earlier. In the period, we recognized total performance fee revenue of £98 million, including the one-off impact of £72 million due to the change in recognition method.

We received £62 million of cash from performance fees, up from £40 million in H1 of last year. Our total balance sheet returns for the period were £112 million, up 57% compared to the previous year.

Preempting the inevitable question on First Brands, the impact was minimal, less than £5 million, and the assumptions on our CLO valuations provided by third-party valuation agents are broadly unchanged compared to March. Stepping back, the revenue profile in the period underlines the trajectory that Benoit spoke about earlier.

These results reinforce our continued successful long-term execution. Over 60% of our revenue in the last 6 months is from management fees, which have grown at an annualized rate of 19% over the last 5 years, and over 80% of our revenue was fee-based.

As we continue to scale up and scale out our investment strategies, I expect this trajectory to continue, with the balance sheet remaining an important asset to enable this growth while becoming less meaningful to our revenue mix. Group operating expenses have grown 1% year on year.

Over the medium term, we would still expect these to grow at mid-to-high single-digit percentage. We are clearly seeing operating leverage come through as our funds get bigger and we raise subsequent vintages, benefiting from the compounding fees-on-fees profile.

This is a theme we've spoken about a lot in recent years, and it's very visible when you compare the 11% annualized growth rate of opex over the last 5 years to the 19% annualized growth of our management fees. The combination of management fee centricity and operating leverage is even clearer if we look at it on an FRE, or fee-related earnings, basis.

This metric takes our management fees and deducts all of our group cash costs. The precise methodology is in the appendix.

There's no entirely consistent market approach, and the team can certainly talk you through this offline. Over the last 5 years, our FRE has grown at an annualized rate of 26%.

What this serves to highlight is the visible growing earnings power of our management fees, the operating leverage we achieve as management fees grow, and given its cash, is a highly valuable earnings stream for shareholders. Over time, FRE growth is an important indicator of how successfully we are executing our strategy of scaling up and scaling out.

The Amundi partnership we announced this morning is a great example of scaling up our credit and LP secondaries platforms. Management fees generated as a result of this partnership should have strong flow-through to FRE, given our high embedded operating leverage.

Over the long term, our combined ability to develop new products that are suitable for the wealth market will help to further diversify and grow our management fee base, which, again, should be visible in our FRE growth. All of which underlines why we think this might be an interesting metric to look at, and of course we'd welcome feedback.

As well as our higher earnings, our growing fee income is generating increased amounts of cash, and our balance sheet is structurally cash flow positive. In the last 6 months, we generated operating cash flow of £450 million, up 143% year on year, driven by higher management fees, realized performance fees, and total balance sheet returns.

We ended the period with total available liquidity of £1.3 billion, net debt of £401 million, and net gearing of 0.15x. During the period, Fitch upgraded our credit outlook to BBB+ stable, and we are now rated BBB+ stable from both agencies.

NAV per share as of the 30th of September was £9. We have ample liquidity and financial resources, which we can use through market cycles to pursue our strategic ambitions of reinforcing our relevance to clients by scaling new strategies and new products.

The current market backdrop is a great opportunity to reinforce our position as a global leader, and we're doing just that. Drawing this all together, our ability to deliver breadth at scale is having clear benefits, which are visible in our financial results.

Since September 2020, ICG has generated over £2.3 billion of cumulative earnings, with nearly half returned to shareholders via dividends. We have a clear and disciplined approach to capital allocation, focused on generating recurring and sustainable growth for shareholders.

I look forward to discussing these results and our outlook with many of you in the coming weeks. With that, I'll hand it back to Chris for questions.

Morning, team. Thanks for the results presentation.

I've got two questions from my side. The first one, on the Amundi partnership, when you think of the scope and depth of private markets for Amundi's 200 million wealth clients, what level of penetration do you think this partnership could be taken to, particularly, Benoit, given your comments on product appropriateness, but also the direction of travel the industry looks like it could be kind of moving towards in terms of potentially combining public and private investment content into a single product?

That's the first question. Then the second question, maybe two-part question on private equity secondaries, obviously an asset class with a lot of growth.

First part, could you talk to the mid-market strategic equity launch in terms of both the timing and the scale of the opportunity? I think this probably has the potential to be pretty accretive to FMC economics because it's investment capabilities and deal flow that lines up with your existing strategic equity franchise.

Then second part of the secondaries question, your comment, Benoit, on industry consolidation in fundraising and the potential for some GPs to go into run-off, LPs will obviously be quite sensitive to this. How do you think about that comment as you're growing your LP secondaries franchise, and do you expect this will create investment opportunities on the LP-led secondaries side?

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think that was three questions craftily put into two. The first one is quite broad.

Your first question on the scope and depth of the wealth market for private assets, it's early days, and so no one really knows, but in theory, the potential is considerable, because up until now, wealth and more broadly retail clients have not had access or very limited access to private assets, which has created a very meaningful divergence between the portfolio composition of institutional investors and that of the wealth channel or more broadly the retail channel. The potential there is undeniably very significant.

As you rightly pointed out, you mentioned the potential need to structure product by potentially mixing some private and public, I think a lot of the growth will be dependent on our ability to structure those products, which is why I'm so excited by the partnership with Amundi, because they're thinking exactly along the same lines. I think by and large today what the market has done is try to shoehorn illiquid private products into the channel, and there are significant limitations and perhaps risks as well to that.

It can be structured in a right way where you're providing some liquidity without losing some of the key advantages of private asset investments. That's clearly what we're going to be focusing on.

In a sense, initially, we're going for the relatively low-hanging fruits, the easy wins, in areas that are structurally more liquid or offer more liquidity, such as credit and LP secondaries, but there's much more that can be done and that we've already started discussing. I'm very excited, but you know us, we never want to overpromise, and these things can also take time.

If I think long term, I think this partnership has enormous potential. For us, it's really important that we're not just part and benefiting from this shift, because there are many ways in which we could have benefited from this long-term shift, but that with Amundi we'll be able to actually influence it, to actually craft or steer the market in a direction that we think is the most sensible.

Your second question was on PE secondaries, and we don't talk about potential size of funds, but yes, you're right that this should be very accretive, because it's not very difficult for us to roll out a mid-market version of our strategic equity strategy, very much in the way we've done that for European Corporate. Having said that, I always word a word of caution, even though we are the global leader in this space and we benefit from a very strong track record, it's still in a way a first-time fund, we always have to be a bit cautious about the speed of fundraise for that.

Yes, medium term, it makes a lot of sense. It should be very accretive.

For us strategically it matters a lot as well, because it enables us to essentially occupy the whole space in terms of size, and so that we keep maintaining the first-mover advantage that we have in that asset class. Yes, very promising.

Finally, you squeezed in a third question on some of the shake-up in the industry with some players will clearly struggle or are already struggling. Will that generate opportunities in the secondaries space?

Perhaps. I'd be somewhat cautious there, because if you think about it, we operate in two segments of secondaries, one which is the more traditional LP secondaries, and typically there, you want to be looking at strong managers with strong assets.

Can you develop a more distressed play as part of that? Perhaps, but I'd be wary of that.

If a manager has underperformed and gone into run-off, there's probably a good reason. Not so sure for LP secondaries.

Likewise, in GP-led secondaries, here you clearly want to be backing only very strong assets with very strong managers. If there are opportunities that come out of some pain in the market, I think it might be a more direct investment potentially in our structured capital strategy.

This is where potentially we could see some opportunities. Depending on how broad-based this phenomenon is, we might revive our recovery fund, which we dust off every time there's a bit of a market crisis.

We're not there yet, right? This is maybe in the future.

Morning, everyone. Congratulations on the results and the deal.

Sticking with the theme largely of Amundi for the first questions really. Amundi on their own slide are talking about 5% EPS accretion linked to the ICG deal from 2028.

Is this purely just their share of the profit from their anticipated 9% 9.9% ownership, or can we read anything into that in terms of the partnership ambition with that? Also sort of linked to Amundi, noting that this is excluding the US, would you be looking for a similar partnership, yeah, in the US, or how do you anticipate to address the US market?

That's really the first question. Second question is a more technical one probably for David.

Can you just help us understand, CLO dividend income was obviously very strong in the period, yeah, much more so than normal, but that contrasted obviously with some mark-to-market credit losses. How can we kind of square the circle?

Why are we seeing sort of good news on one side, but then sort of bad news on the other side of, yeah, what is obviously a related piece? Thank you.

Thanks, David. That was again three questions pretending to be two.

I'll take the first one very briefly. No, you can read nothing into that number.

That's a question for Amundi, but there's nothing you could read into that figure as regards the partnership at all. Benoit, do you want to pick up sort of the wealth strategy in the US, and then David, maybe you talk about the CLO question?

Sure. A couple of things.

One is, even though we've generally been more cautious, we haven't been standing still. We have been addressing the wealth channel in the US for a number of years.

You may remember that we were an early investors in in in CAIS, which is a distributor. We still are, by the way, and, that that's been a that in itself that's been a very, very good investment for us.

Obviously that's one way for us to to deploy, particularly in in in secondaries, both both in both GP-led and and LP and LP secondaries. Also, we've had relationship with a number of of banks of large banks distributing in a number of other strategies in the US, and that is, that will that will continue.

I think, the the exclusion here reflects the fact that, this is this is not a geography where Amundi has significant has significant presence. That's that's that's the that's the answer on on the on the US on the US part of our strategy.

Yeah. Then, David, on your more technical question about CLOs, as you said, you I think have to look at this in the round.

The total returns across all the asset classes on the balance sheet were positive, including the credit business stripe. As you say, dividends were actually a little higher than where they've run historically.

That tells you more about the performance of the underlying funds being good and performing in line with expectations, hence the generation of dividends. We'll continue to mark the book in accordance with the third-party model.

There's nothing certainly in the data that gives us any broader concern at this point.

Thank you.

I'll take the first question, but I think that's the same question as from Oliver at Goldman Sachs. I'll make the same answer.

I think the long-term potential is very significant, but I'm always cautious about overpromising in the short to medium term, particularly since in a number of areas, essentially we're going to be creating the market. I mentioned there are some easy wins, and yes, we'll benefit from that, but the biggest prize is what we'll do in the longer term.

That's where you'll see some very significant or potentially see some very significant impact. I think at this point that's all that we can say.

On

the balance sheet, Hubert, you know this, but the balance sheet is an outcome of how the funds are performing over a period of time, and again, we don't manage the balance sheet as an independent exercise. It's going to be what the funds perform over time.

If you look at the NIR over time, 5 years about 9% now, and total balance sheet returns about 11%, clearly over the medium to long term, it's reflecting fund performance as you'd expect it to.

I think it might be worth reminding everyone, David, that, as you've said, the performance of the balance sheet has to be looked at over the long run, because over short periods of time, what's mostly influencing it is our pace of deployment, because we keep the valuations flat typically for a year, when we increase deployment, it has a short-term negative impact or perceived negative impact on the balance sheet performance, but obviously that evens out over time. Changing tack slightly, we've had a quick question online around the status of fundraising for real estate equity.

As a reminder, we raised just over $1 billion in real estate equity in Europe during this half. Benoît, do you have any broader observations or comments around the real estate fundraising market at the moment?

Sure. It's been incredibly difficult these past few years because it is one of the asset class where the pain has been taken, valuations have come down, and so LPs have suffered some significant losses or at least underperformance in their existing real estate portfolio.

Generally that creates a pause in the fundraising appetite. For us, that creates an opportunity because we did not have legacy real estate equity strategies or funds, which means that we don't have to be firefighting on older vintages.

Essentially, we're starting from a clean slate. Our timing is very good in terms of establishing ourselves in the market.

It's creating a window, but obviously it takes a bit longer because the fundraising environment has been more difficult. It's starting to reopen.

I think I mentioned during the presentation that some of the strategies that LPs are looking at right now, that includes real assets. There's increased appetite for real assets and real estate, and so we're starting to see that.

It takes time, and it's early days for us, but I'm very confident that for us the real estate asset class is going to be an area of significant growth in the next 5 to 10 years, and we're taking the cycle exactly at the right time. We're starting to progressively see that it's speeding up, we're raising more, but I think fast-forward 5 years from now, you'll see that our real estate franchise will be a bigger part of what we do.

Thank you. A question online around the economics of the Amundi partnership and how that will work.

I'll take that. It will obviously vary by product.

We obviously don't disclose terms of individual funds and strategies. As David alluded to or mentioned earlier, we think over the medium term, this is a very exciting opportunity, and there's a lot of value to be created for all of the stakeholders involved in this, including the end clients.

That's how we're thinking about the economics of that partnership. Another on the partnership, and this may be one for you, David.

Look, the structure looks clear, the end outcome, 9.9% economic share, 4.9% voting rights, looks clear. Would you mind just running through briefly the steps of how we're getting there from today by the 30th of June 2027, please?

Sure, happy to do that. Actually the best page, if you have it to refer to, is probably page 25 of our presentation, where we lay out a little bit more detail on the steps that will take place.

As you can see, and as we've discussed, through the steps, Amundi's going to acquire 9.9% economic stake. I think the key point here, though, is that there's no dilution to ICG shareholders, and Amundi's going to be paying for all the voting and non-voting shares using their own cash reserves.

The first step is for Amundi to acquire 4.64% ordinary shares in the secondary market. Then ICG has agreed to repurchase 5.26% of ordinary shares to be canceled, with Amundi then subscribing to non-voting shares that basically have the same economic ownership.

It'll happen in tranches over time, and as Chris mentioned, it'll be completed by the 30th of June 2027. Ownership stakes, share buyback activities will be disclosed in the normal way as all of these steps progress.

I also just want to emphasize the structure ensures no dilution to existing shareholders and no change to the ICG balance sheet, P&L, or cash position.

Thanks, Angeliki. On the exclusivity, the important part is that this is mutually exclusive, right?

Are we limiting ourselves? Yes, you could say we could also distribute through others, but Amundi is by far the largest asset manager, traditional asset manager in Europe, and they're going exclusive with us as well.

I think it's incredibly valuable for both parties and should enable us to accelerate our position in the wealth market in a way that we would not have been able to had we gone through just normal commercial agreements on a fund-by-fund basis. By the way, the way typically these agreements work is those distributors always ask for exclusivity at least for a period of time when they're distributing a fund.

Even if you're going fund by fund, you're still giving exclusivity to JPMorgan, for instance, you've been distributing several of our products, for a period of time. No, on that point, I think it's only positive.

I think it's very, very positive for both parties. On Europe IX, we don't comment on ultimate target.

The one thing I would say is that, as always, we're not obsessed with size. For me, the key criteria on the size of a fund is ability to deploy it well in a 3 to 4-year period.

As always, when we're sizing a fund, we take a look at the speed of deployment in the first year or the first 18 months of the life of the fund, in parallel with the fundraising effort, and we're right in the middle of that right now. Depending on that and our own assessment of the market, we either push the size up or we remain more cautious.

It's too early to say.

Just to build on Benoît's answer to the first question, this isn't going exclusive with one person, right? Amundi have got relations and network of more than 600 distributors and over 200 million individual clients.

This doesn't limit us. This opens up a significant opportunity.

I think definitely we're thinking about it in that way. There's another question now online around private credit and how we see the deployment pipeline in private credit.

Benoit, do you want to make some comments around that market as a whole?

Sure. Broad context is that the buy-out market remains slow, certainly slower than it was 4 or 5 years ago, and that has an impact on the credit and the private debt market, because these markets are essentially aligned with the private equity buy-out space.

That's for the general environment. Within that, it's obviously easier if you benefit from a long history and a large existing portfolio, because those existing portfolios generate their own financing opportunities.

If I look at where we deploy quite significantly in Europe, we deploy €3 billion, €4 billion per year. Actually, this year we're on track to be at the upper end.

A significant portion of that, call it two thirds to three quarters is by taking advantage, mining our existing portfolio. That has very big impact on our ability to deploy and deploy well.

That's a competitive advantage, if you will. Overall, we are cautious in this market environment.

There are areas of the market where we feel it's overheating. It's probably much more pronounced in the US than Europe, but Europe is not immune.

We remain cautious in the way we deploy, and particularly we remain very cautious on the quality of legal protections and legal documentation, where we're seeing in some instances things that we find are unsatisfactory, and so we stay away. Then

Yeah. As I said in my sort of prepared remarks, I wouldn't read too much into a 1% change in cost base.

There has been, as we mentioned in the presentation, quite a lot of cost discipline in the system. Our headcount's actually slightly down period on period.

As we continue to scale the business out, we've made a lot of investments in the past that we've spoken about, and actually a lot of that is now in place, so that's a good and positive backdrop. I'd still guide people to cost base increase more between the 5% and 10% range at this point, because there'll be some seasonal effects anyway when you're looking at this over 6 months, so that's how I'd guide for the future.

Then

Could you sort of talk a

Yeah. FRE, as I said, I think is another way to think about our business.

It's obviously one that many others use to compare asset management companies and their growth potential, actually having a comparable metric I think in the public domain is helpful. Many analysts obviously do it already, here's us explaining how we think about it internally.

It brings together also a number of the themes that I touched on the presentation. If you think about our management fee growth of 19% over 5 years, our cost growth 11% over 5 years, it comes together into a very powerful FRE outcome.

It's grown 26%. For now and for the future, this is probably another one that we should watch and monitor, and we'll continue to evolve our financial disclosure as always, and appreciate the feedback.

Absolutely. Just for clarity, that's 26% annualized FRE growth over the last 5 years.