StepStone Group Inc. (STEP) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

$2.2 billion of subscriptions in our private wealth suite of offerings, growing the platform to nearly $10 billion as of the end of June. We are thrilled to have officially crossed the $10 billion threshold in July. Additionally, we have grown our evergreen non-traded BDC, S-CRED, to greater than $1 billion in net assets. We have expanded our private wealth platform to over 550 individual distribution partners. And among our partners that have been with us on the platform for at least a year, 50% are selling more than one evergreen product. Slide 9 shows our free-earning AUM by structure and asset class. For the quarter, we increased free-earning assets by $6 billion. Our undeployed fee-earning capital, or UFEC, grew by over $4 billion from the last quarter to nearly $29 billion, driven primarily by strong managed account fundraising. The combination of fee-earning assets plus UFEC grew to $156 billion, which is up $10 billion sequentially and is up $28 billion from a year ago. This translates to a healthy 20% annual organic growth rate since fiscal 2021. Slide 10 shows our evolution of fee revenues. We generated a blended management fee rate of 64 basis points over the last 12 months, down slightly from the 65 basis points in fiscal 2025, driven by the moderation in retroactive fees. Finally, I am pleased to announce that we are raising our quarterly dividend by 17% from $0.24 per share to $0.28 per share, reflecting strong and sustainable growth in our fee-related earnings. I'll now turn the call over to David to speak to our financial highlights. Thanks, Mike. Turn to slide 12, we earned fee revenues of $213 million, up 19% from the prior year quarter. We achieved this increase despite significantly lower retroactive fees in the current year period of $3 million v...