Chris Hunt
Good morning. Thank you for joining this webcast covering ICG’s results for the 12 months ended March 31 2026. The slides are available on our website along with the accompanying results announcement.
As a reminder, unless stated otherwise, all financial information discussed today is based on alternative performance measures, which exclude the consolidation of some of our fund structures as required under IFRS. This morning, I’m joined by our CIO and CEO, Benoit Durteste; and our CFO, David Bicarregui. They will give an overview of our performance during the year, and we will then take questions.
And with that, I hand over to Benoit.
Benoît Durteste
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Full year ’26 has been a good year for ICG. We reinforced our scale and competitive position, beat by some margin our fundraising targets, established a strategic relationship with Amundi and, more generally, built on our track record of strategic and financial growth.
Over the next 45 minutes, we will be discussing this in more detail. But first, I’d like to look at this year in the context of what I believe underpins ICG’s success. It comes as no surprise to those who have been following us for some time that our first priority remains investment performance. As more capital comes into private markets from non-traditional sources and new fund structures, I think this only becomes more important.
We are not looking to offer clients beta or to take inconsiderate risk. We want to offer them consistent outperformance, with a particular focus on cash returns and realised performance or, in industry lingo, DPI. We’re not looking to grow AUM at all costs. We are focused on delivering significant growth that is built on enhancing the track record and reputation of existing strategies and introducing new strategies with solid foundations, all with a view to generating long-term, sustainable, consistent FRE growth. And this approach is clearly leading to ICG gaining market share.
And we have a substantial amount of white space to grow into, both in our flagships and our scaling strategies. If we continue to execute successfully on the opportunities ahead of us, this will inevitably translate into strong shareholder outcomes in the form of earnings growth and cash generation.
In that context, our strategy is clear. We aim to reinforce our position as a leader in alternative asset management with a reputation for uncompromising focus on investment performance. We are doing that by scaling up established strategies and scaling out into new areas where we see client demand and attractive investment opportunities. This is reinforcing our position with clients.
And during full year ’26, we gained 83 new institutional LPs, bringing our total to over 870. In my view, the number of alternative asset managers that have the potential to be globally relevant to clients is shrinking. ICG has emerged as one of the winners in this regard, and I believe we are positioned to continue that trajectory of out-performance.
Turning to FEAUM ’26 in more detail. As of March 31 2026, we managed $126 billion of assets globally. Fundraising in the year outperformed our expectations at $17 billion and fee-earning AUM grew 11% during the year. We grew flagship and scaling strategies, established an exciting long-term partnership in the wealth market with Amundi, and we continue to hire, notably broadening our insurance and North
American coverage within our marketing teams and hiring into our European and Asian corporate investment teams.
We are absolutely on the front foot during the cycle. That translated into strong financial performance. We generated $350 million of fee-related earnings, or FRE, that’s up 23% year-on-year. We are also reporting GBP127 million of performance fee income and GBP861 million of group operating cash flow, a record level by quite some margin.
To dig a bit deeper into fundraising, which at $17 billion materially surpassed our expectations, we had our best year ever for real assets raising $5.5 billion and for scaling strategies more broadly, which include rail assets, where we attracted $8.4 billion.
In total, 34% of our capital came from North America. This is an interesting trend that I think is driven by two factors. Firstly, there’s clearly a desire among some North American LPs to diversify into Europe. Across many of our strategies, we’re natural beneficiaries of this.
And secondly, it is testament to the years of effort we’ve put into our American marketing capabilities and to the increasing recognition of our performance and breadth. Turning to some specifics, Europe IX has continued to raise very successfully, both in terms of size and pace, and today stands at over EUR10 billion. We will likely be oversubscribed and will hold a final close by the summer, ahead of the initial fundraising period deadline.
In a market environment where many require extensions to fundraising periods, this is an impressive outcome. This is also ICG’s first ever commingled fund to be bigger than €10 billion. It operates in a space that is increasingly attractive and I believe it will be the largest structured capital fund of its kind globally. We are also, as you know, a global leader in GP-led secondaries. And I do not know of any other European manager with global leadership in two asset classes. So, positive developments for the flagship.
We also had two scaling strategies that held final closes for their more mature funds, both at or even above their targets and both in real assets. Infrastructure II and Metro II saw big upsizes, high re-up rates and strong cross-selling from existing ICG clients as well as good interest from new clients. Successful second vintages are a critical milestone. They are vital to cementing the reputation and position of a strategy.
As a result, we can look confidently to meaningful growth in both strategies in the coming decade. This is a very promising development. We now have visibility on significant organic growth potential in the broad real assets space. And this could be further enhanced by expanding into adjacencies such as infrastructure Asia, which we have recently launched, or others, such as possibly infrastructure debt.
Looking ahead, we have high hopes for LP secondaries, which will be in the market for full year ’27. It is also likely we will launch the sixth vintages of both Strategic Equity and Senior Debt Partners later in full year ’27, although the exact timing of those is not certain. Given our fundraising cycle and which funds happen to be in market at a given point in time, we’d expect fundraising in full year ’27 naturally to be below that in full year ’26. But as David will talk about later, the trajectory of our fee-earning AUM, which drives our management fees and FRE, is only loosely related to in-year fundraising. It’s really the fundraising cycle that matters.
And on this, importantly, this year has anchored our performance for this fundraising cycle. And it’s clear that we are well on our way to achieving our full year fundraising guidance potentially even a year early.
Turning to investment activity. Transaction levels remained healthy over the last 12 months. We deployed
$14 billion across our direct investment strategies and realized almost $7 billion. The broader point in my view is that while there is always an element of lumpiness in these figures, we have remained very disciplined in our deployment across strategies.
Our investment committees drive this culture. And during the year, these discussions have been some of the hardest in my memory. We have, for instance, clearly been more cautious than many in direct lending in recent years, although in full year ’26, largely by taking advantage of financing opportunities in our existing portfolio, this strategy deployed close to $4 billion.
And in secondaries, both GP- and LP-led, the opportunity set has been huge, but we are being increasingly selective and, in particular, cautious around valuations. Given the macro situation, I do not anticipate a meaningful change in the investment environment during full year ’27. And with dry powder of $36 billion, we are well positioned across all asset classes to invest through the cycle and to lean in hard when we see particular opportunities emerge.
Ultimately, what clients care about is realized performance and cash return, especially in higher-return strategies with no natural liquidity. These strategies, which represented three quarters of our management fees in full year ’26 have an established track record of market-leading DPI. During the year, we distributed $9 billion to clients in these strategies, further anchoring fund returns.
On the right-hand side of the slide, we show how DPI for a number of these funds has evolved over time. This metric is clearly becoming more meaningful for clients and is a key differentiator for many of ICG’s strategies, directly contributing to our continued success in fundraising.
Meanwhile, our debt strategies have continued to perform strongly. I’m going to spend a minute on direct lending, our Senior Debt Partners flagship strategy, to remind you what we do, and given the noise in the market, what we do not do. One hundred percent of our loans from SDP are senior secured, cash-pay, cash-flow-based lending. In that way, we’re old school. We do not lend to value or to revenue. There is no PIK or sub debt in SDP. We have minimal software exposure. I mean, in the unrealised vintages at SDP 5 and 4, it’s approximately 5%.
And for the last two years, we have not written a single direct loan in the US by choice. From a product perspective, we have no open-ended or so-called semi-liquid structures in direct lending. And the consequences here are twofold. Firstly, we are not exposed at all to redemptions and, secondly, we have substantial dry powder to deploy and take advantage of the cycle. And this conservative approach has not escaped institutional investors and is contributing to our enhanced reputation.
Our CLO business, which is also not exposed to redemptions, has similarly been performing strongly. This year, we issued three new CLOs and are continuing to receive dividends in line with our historical average. So, in all, when I look across the portfolios and fund performance, whether higher-return strategies or debt strategies, I feel we are very well positioned to continue to deliver for our clients and to strengthen our market position and standing with LPs.
That delivery and our clients’ confidence in our future potential has enabled us to gain market share in recent years across both our flagship and scaling strategies. This slide is indicative only as market-wide data is never perfect and or entirely comparable. But based on publicly available data, all of these strategies have grown faster than the markets in which they operate.
But let me reiterate, and it goes back to my first slide, I view this as an output of our investment performance. The top-quality returns to clients drive growth. And I expect that to continue. Institutional
investors with whom I engage all the time remain committed to private markets and are looking to grow allocations with the right managers.
However, from my perspective, they are increasingly focused on alignment of interests with GPs. They are increasingly aware of managers pursuing an AUM-gathering strategy. They do not want their deployment cycle to be governed by the ebbs and flows of wealth capital in evergreen vehicles or to have to worry about potential conflicts of interest in allocations. In this respect, ICG stands in a differentiated position compared to many of our global alternative asset manager peers.
Looking ahead, the opportunity set for us is huge. Based on our existing client base today, three quarters are invested in only one strategy and fewer than 20% are invested in two strategies. As demonstrated by the final close of Infra II and Metro II in real assets, cross-selling is becoming an increasingly meaningful part of our fundraising, along with our continued ability to attract new clients. I’m confident that today, we have the investment strategies, scale, and client franchise to be a beneficiary of institutions seeking to do more with fewer managers.
To conclude, I’m very proud of the results we are reporting today. I view them as another checkpoint in the journey of profitable, scalable growth that ICG has been on for over a decade, and I see huge opportunity ahead. Importantly, our strategy is clear, aligned to what our clients want and how the market is evolving, and we have financial resources and people to execute on it.
And with that, I’ll pass over to David.
David Bicarregui
Thank you, Benoit. I’m going to talk about our evolved financial presentation and then dig into our FY26 financial performance in more detail. But before that, I want to reinforce the link between the strategy that Benoit has just outlined and the financial results we’re reporting. We have a broad and scaled range of investment strategies across multiple asset classes, which has led over the last five years to our fee earning AUM doubling to $87 billion at March ’26, all organically.
And due to our focus on growing higher-return, higher-fee strategies, we have seen a very positive mix effect in our management fee rate, which has expanded by 13 basis points over the last five years to stand at 98 basis points today. The link to our financial performance is clear: a diversified range of scaled and scalable strategies that meet our clients’ needs, leading to growing fee-earning AUM at attractive management fee rates. This resulted in management fee growth above that of fee-earning AUM.
As our strategies scale up through multiple vintages, we see significant operating leverage. That link between our strategy and our financial performance has driven the evolution in our financial presentation that you see today, which focuses on three distinct related attributes for value.
The first is fee-related earnings, or FRE, defined as the profit generated from the management fees, less group cash operating expenses. This metric clearly shows the trajectory I was describing on the previous page of growing fee-earning AUM, management fees, and operating leverage. Shareholders also receive performance fee income, which in our financials has no cost associated with it.
And finally, we have the balance sheet portfolio, which co-invests alongside our clients in our funds and seeds new strategies and products. Alongside these three metrics, we will also focus on group operating cash flow and net debt. Importantly, from a shareholder perspective, we are also reporting these on a per-share basis.
Put together, this financial presentation aligns with our business and the drivers of shareholder value. It’s clear and simple and it’s comparable to other global alternative asset managers. In the coming pages, I will focus on each of these five components. Feedback on our FRE disclosure back in November was very positive. And of course, we will welcome any more thoughts on this evolution.
As a result of these changes, we are updating our medium-term financial guidance. We are replacing guidance on FMC margin with guidance that, over the medium term, we expect FRE margin, excluding catch-up fees, to expand. Over the last five years, FRE margin has grown by 14 percentage points. The rest of the guidance remains unchanged.
And as Benoit said, we’re two years into our fundraising guidance and have raised $40 billion of the $55 billion, so well on our way to meeting or exceeding this target. And we continue to expect performance fee income over the medium term to represent between 10% and 20% of our total fee income.
So moving to full year ’26 specifically and starting with a snapshot of the financial performance, we are reporting FRE of GBP350 million, up 23% year-on-year. Performance fees were GBP127 million, including a GBP72 million transitional gain due to the change in recognition methodology announced in October of 2025. And our balance sheet portfolio stood at GBP2.6 billion. You can see these on a per share basis on the right-hand side of the page.
At a group level, our operating cash flow was very high at GBP861 million. This was a key driver in reducing our net debt to GBP113 million, down from GBP629 million in March ’25, and our net debt to FRE now stands at 0.3 times. So before moving to each of these metrics in turn, I’ll start with fee-earning AUM. This has grown 11% over the last 12 months and today stands at $87 billion. We also had $19 billion of AUM not yet earning fees, which would generate approximately GBP120 million in annual management fees if deployed.
And as Benoit said earlier, in-year fundraising only has a loose link to the in-year trajectory of fee-earning AUM. This is clear if you look at this over the last decade. Fee-earning AUM has grown every year, including through a series of macro shocks, during which public market valuations and private market transaction activity saw periods of significant volatility.
Over the last decade, our fee-earning AUM has grown at an annualised rate of 17% and over the last five years at an annualised rate of 14%. The effects of fee-earning AUM growth and expanding fee rates are visible in our management fees, which for FY26 were GBP685 million, up 13% year-on-year in absolute terms or 17% excluding catch-up fees.
Over the last five years, management fees have grown at an annualised rate of 20%. Over that period, we have also seen a meaningful shift in the composition of management fees by asset class. As shown on the chart on the left, credit and private debt have grown more modestly over this period, while structured capital, private equity secondaries and real assets have delivered significant expansion, and combined our higher-return strategies account for over 75% of our management fees.
Looked at another way, the three scaling strategies that Benoit mentioned earlier, LP secondaries, real estate and infrastructure, have become increasingly meaningful. Together, the three of them now account for over 20% of group management fees compared to around 10% five years ago. This is an important development. It reflects the success of building these capabilities organically, is evidence of the increasing diversification at scale and gives clear visibility on the embedded growth potential within ICG today.
Turning to FRE, which for FY26 was GBP350 million or 120p per share, this is up 23% in the year and 30% annualized over the last five years driven by high growth in management fees, alongside strong cost control, with FRE operating expenses up 5% year-on-year. Our FRE margin, excluding catch-up fees over the last five years, has grown from 33% in FY21 to 47% today.
And as I said earlier, over the medium term, we expect to see continued expansion in that FRE margin. Performance fee income was GBP127 million this year, including a GBP72 million transitional gain due to the change in recognition approach announced in October 2025. The majority of the transition gain, GBP49 million, was driven by the initial recognition in structured capital and secondary strategies, including Europe VIII, SE IV and Mid-Market I. Realised performance fees, that is cash received, came in at GBP96 million in the year due to some large realisations for funds that are in carry.
Looking ahead, as we continue to grow high return strategies, performance fees are likely to become a more visible and significant contributor to our top line.
Moving to the balance sheet portfolio, which had an asset value of GBP2.6 billion as of March, our balance sheet exists to support the growth in our fee-earning AUM, which it does through two routes. Firstly, co-investing alongside our funds, which accounts for about 90% of the fair value; and secondly, by seeding new strategies and new products.
As a result, the balance sheet performance mirrors that of the funds in which we invest. From a P&L perspective, over the last five years it has generated an average annual return of 10%, including a 5% return for this financial year. During the year, all asset classes except debt generated between 5% and 8% returns, while debt returned negative GBP7 million, or negative 2%. This outcome in the context of a challenging macro backdrop underlines the diversification and the resilience of the balance sheet portfolio, which we expect to generate low double-digit percentage annualised returns over the long term.
This gives outcome in the context of a challenging macro backdrop underlines the diversification and the resilience of the balance sheet portfolio, which we expect to generate low double-digit percentage annualized returns over the long term. From a cash perspective, not only does the balance sheet benefit from the cash generation of our funds, we have also been deliberately reducing the absolute commitment from ICG plc as strategies become more established.
We have a proven track record of doing this, which you can see clearly on the right-hand side. As a result, organically growing strategies are cash-intensive in the early years and progressively asset-light as we move through the vintages. Doing this successfully is highly accretive to FRE per share and the co-investment portfolio has become highly cash-generative as vintages have progressed.
This dynamic is now quite visible, with the co-investment portfolio generating an average net cash flow yield over the last five years of 10%. Indeed, as we believe we’re in the early stages of a multi-year cycle in which the balance sheet could generate significant cash from our existing product set, as older investments are realised and funds currently being invested have lower absolute commitments from the firm. Of course, there’ll be an element of lumpiness to this, but the structural trend is clear.
Cash received from FRE, performance fees and the balance sheet portfolio have each grown year-on-year in full year ’26. This has led to a very strong year for the group operating cash flow, which totalled GBP861 million compared to GBP533 million last year. And as a result of this profitable, cash-generative growth, our financial position has never been stronger. We ended the period with total available liquidity of GBP1.5 billion and net debt of GBP113 million. We have a very robust capital structure and a disciplined approach to managing both our debt and our equity base.
So drawing this all together, we have strategic and financial flexibility like never before to maximise long-term shareholder value. And we have a clear capital allocation priority to execute on that. Our progressive dividend policy continues and our ordinary dividend of 87p per share for full year ’26 marks the 16th consecutive year of growth.
Once we reach a position of zero net debt, we will continue to allocate thoughtfully. In this regard, all options are on the table: optimising co-investments alongside our existing products and strategies, seeding new products and strategies, making strategic investments, whether in M&A or partnerships more broadly, and of course, returning capital to shareholders through dividends or buybacks.
As a management team, we view these options in the round to assess what will generate the best risk-adjusted long-term growth in FRE per share. Taken together, these results give us confidence in the trajectory of the business and in the opportunities ahead.
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