Good morning and welcome to Evercore's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's call is scheduled to last about one hour, including remarks by Evercore management and the question and answer session. In order to ask a question, please press the star key followed by the number one on your touchtone phone at any time. I will now turn the call over to Katy Haber, head of investor relations at Evercore. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning and thank you for joining us today for Evercore's third quarter 2026 financial results conference call. I'm Katy Haber, Evercore's Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today is John Weinberg, our Chairman and CEO, and Tim Lalonde, our CFO. After our prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing Evercore's third quarter 2026 financial results. Our discussion of our results today is complementary to the press release, which is available on our website at evercore.com. This conference call is being webcast live in the For Investors section of our website, and an archive of it will be available for 30 days beginning approximately one hour after the conclusion of this call. In the course of this conference call, we may make a number of forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and there are important factors that could cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, Those discussed in AverCorp's filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and current reports on Form 8-K. I want to remind you that the company assumes no duty to update any forward-looking statements. In our presentation today, unless otherwise indicated, we will be discussing adjusted financial measures, which are non-GAAP measures that we believe are meaningful when evaluating the company's performance. For detailed disclosures on these measures and the GAAP reconciliations, You should refer to the financial data contained within our press release, which is posted on our website. We continue to believe that it is important to evaluate Evercore's performance on an annual basis. As we've noted previously, our results for any particular quarter are influenced by the timing of transaction closing. I will now turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Katy, and good morning, everyone. Evercore delivered record third quarter adjusted net revenues and earnings per share, reflecting the strength, diversification, and further globalization of our business and the continued execution of our strategic priorities. Adjusted net revenues of nearly $1.2 billion marked our sixth consecutive quarterly revenue record. This is a 13% increase from the record third quarter we delivered last year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $4.28, also a record for the third quarter. Through the first nine months, we generated adjusted net revenues of $3.6 billion, which is up 38% versus the same time period a year ago. Importantly, our performance continues to be broad-based with all of our businesses operating at healthy levels and contributing to the strength of the firms. At the core of our performance is our focus on providing clients with the highest quality service, advice, and execution. We remain encouraged by the outlook of our business, supported by the breadth of activity across our platform, strengths of our client relationships, and the significant investments we have made to expand our capabilities. As it relates to the market environment, industry-wide announced M&A activity continues to operate at healthy levels year-to-date, despite some quarter-to-quarter variability. Looking longer term, global announced M&A activity relative to total market cap has improved, yet still remains below historical averages. Large-cap strategic M&A has been a primary driver of activity in recent quarters, and we continue to see strong trends in this part of the market. Financial sponsor and middle market activity continues to run below historical levels, though we've seen gradual improvement. Further broadening of activity in these areas over time would provide an additional source of growth, both for the broader market and forever core. While the market backdrop remains complex, including interest rates uncertainty, continued geopolitical tensions, and evolving implications of AI, We believe the underlying environment for investment banking activity remains constructive. As it relates to Evercore, we continue to see high levels of activity across a broad range of sectors, products, and geographies. Client engagement is strong, and our backlog, which is at record levels, continues to replenish at a healthy rate. Turning to talent, as announced last week, the board appointed Nigel Dawn, and Navidin Aniraj to become co-presidents of Evercore effective January 1st, 2027. As we mentioned, this new leadership structure will enable the firm to continue to build on our strategy for growth. Since our last earnings call, six senior managing directors have joined our investment banking practice. Five additions in the United States, including two in aerospace and defense, one in healthcare, Chemicals, and Equity Capital Markets, as well as one in our Frankfurt office. Further, an additional SMD has committed to join our restructuring group and will be based in France. That brings the total number of SMDs added this year to 14, and the total number of SMDs in our global investment banking practice to 191. Now, let me turn to the businesses. In North American Strategic Advisory, the business remained active across nearly all sectors, consistent with trends throughout the year, contributing to a record third quarter for the business. Our engagement with financial sponsors continues to strengthen, reflected in a higher year-to-date pitch activity, coupled with a continuously improving win rate, resulting in increased revenues compared to last year. Our EMEA strategic advisory business delivered another strong quarter with our expanded presence in the region resulting in record year-to-date revenues. Our strategic defense and shareholder advisory group continues to see strong activity supported by elevated levels of shareholder activism. Globally, in the third quarter and into October, we advised on a number of significant transactions including PTC on its $24 billion sale Schneider Electric GE Aerospace on its $11.75 billion acquisition of Consolidated Precision Products EasyJet on its $5.6 billion sale to Apollo Seagrow on its all share combination with Prologis Nexus Data Centers on the $15.6 billion construction financing of its inaugural data center and power development project. Broadcom on a transaction enabling the deployment of $63 billion of AI compute capacity to Anthropic, which announced earlier this week. Consistent with trends in the first half, our reliability management and restructuring business maintains strong activity levels as companies continue to address upcoming debt maturities particularly in a higher interest rate environment. Our private capital markets and debt advisory business is seeing growing levels of activity in innovative financing solutions supporting the expansion of digital infrastructure over the last year as highlighted by several of the deals I just mentioned. Our market leading private capital advisory and fundraising businesses respectively saw positive trends in the quarter Our equity capital markets business had a strong quarter supported by a more constructive IPO market earlier in the quarter and our equities business generated solid revenues. Evercore ISI achieved the number one ranking on a weighted basis in Excel's All-American Research Analyst Survey for the fifth consecutive year. and finally, our wealth management business ended the quarter with AUM of $16.2 billion and maintains a strong long-term performance. Before I turn it over to Tim, I want to take a moment to reiterate a few important points about Evercore's position and the opportunity ahead. Over the past decade, we've expanded and diversified our platform across products, sectors, geographies and client segments Broadening the opportunities to serve clients while maintaining our strong focus on culture. While advising on many of the world's largest and most transformative M&A transactions is core to our strategy, our franchise extends across the full spectrum of the market with respect to both size and transaction type. Specifically, we've made significant investments in expanding our financial sponsor coverage over the last several years. Today, across our financial sponsors coverage and private capital related businesses, we have over 60 senior bankers specifically covering this important client segment working closely with our sector bankers. As we continue to build out the firm, we have similarly expanded our middle market coverage by investing in high quality bankers across sectors where we see significant opportunity, including recently in our aerospace and defense logistics We believe we are now well positioned to take advantage of this part of the market. We also remain focused on hiring additional product specialists, which is something we've been executing on over the last several years. At the same time, we've continued to diversify our revenue base beyond M&A, building successful businesses across a range of other areas. Even with significant growth in M&A, non-M&A businesses have contributed more than 40% of firm-wide adjusted net revenues over the last four quarters, providing greater diversification and resilience across market cycles. This growth has been supported by significant investment in our people. Our investment banking SMD base has grown nearly 70% since 2021, while productivity remains at market-leading levels. and it is important to note that we have more than 50 SMDs still ramping, representing meaningful opportunity for future growth and we continue to have a robust recruiting pipeline. Together, these investments have meaningfully expanded our addressable market, strengthened our competitive position and contributed to significant market share gains. Our results this quarter reflect the collective strength of our platform, are people and the strong momentum across our businesses. We believe substantial opportunity lies ahead and that Evercore is well positioned for the next phase of growth. With that, let me turn it over to Tim. Thank you, John.

Evercore's third quarter results reflect strong performance across our diversified mix of businesses. For the third quarter of 2026, net revenues, operating income, and EPS on a GAAP basis were $1.2 billion, $243 million and $3.93 per share, respectively. My comments from here will focus on non-GAAP metrics, which we believe are useful when evaluating our results. Our standard GAAP reporting and a reconciliation of GAAP to adjusted results can be found in our press release, which is on our website. Our third quarter adjusted net revenues of nearly $1.2 billion increased 13% year-over-year. This marks Evercore's sixth consecutive quarterly revenue record. Year-to-date, we have generated record adjusted net revenues of $3.6 billion, up 38% from the prior year period. Third quarter, adjusted operating income of $270 million increased 18% versus the third quarter of 2025. Adjusted earnings per share of $4.28 was a record for the third quarter and increased 23% year over year. For the nine months, our adjusted EPS is up 57% compared to the prior year nine months. Turning to the businesses, record third quarter adjusted advisory fees of $1 billion increased 14% versus last year's record third quarter. This performance reflects continued market share gains, increased productivity per SMD, and a higher number of fee events. Based on our record backlogs and other early indicators, we expect activity levels to remain strong. Our third quarter underwriting revenues were $56 million, up 27% from a year ago, driven by healthy IPO activity. Commissions and related revenue of $61 million was down 4% year-over-year amid lower volatility and industry-wide trading volumes. Third quarter adjusted asset management and administration fees of $26 billion, rose 9% year-over-year. Third quarter adjusted other revenue, net, was approximately $25 million, of which approximately $23 million was from interest income. Turning to expenses, the adjusted compensation ratio for the third quarter is 63%, down 200 basis points from the prior year period and down 50 basis points from last quarter. Marking significant improvement on both an annual and quarterly basis. We are striving to achieve further revenue growth and improvement in the compensation ratio over time. Though equity market sentiment can change quickly and somewhat frequently, we believe the building blocks for a constructive M&A market, such as CEO confidence levels, financing availability, industry disruptions, and compelling strategic rationale remain in place. Adjusted non-compensation expenses in the quarter were $166 million, representing an adjusted non-comp ratio of 14.1%, which is down 340 basis points from last quarter. The second quarter's adjusted non-comp ratio was higher due to a combination of an investment in growth and some seasonal or episodic costs. The stronger adjusted net revenues this quarter also played a role in the improvement in the ratio. As discussed on our last quarter call, similar to revenues, non-comp expenses and ratios are best evaluated across multiple quarters. Our year to date adjusted non-comp ratio is 13.7%. The increase in non-comp Thank you for joining us. The higher level of increase in non-comp expense seen in the last three years supported the doubling of our business as our adjusted net revenues have increased from $2.4 billion in 2023 to approximately $4.9 billion in the latest four quarters. Over that same period of time, our non-comp expense ratio has declined significantly. from 16.6% to 13.7% year-to-date. We are striving to achieve a lower growth rate in non-comp expense over the next several years. Our adjusted tax rate for the quarter was 28.5%, down slightly from the third quarter of last year. Turning to our balance sheet, As of September 30, our cash and investment securities totaled approximately $2.8 billion, up from $2.4 billion a year ago. During the quarter, we returned $189 million of capital to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, including the repurchase of approximately 520,000 shares at an average price of $291.60. This represented a record level of capital returned for a third quarter. Through the first nine months of the year, we returned over $1 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, exceeding the amount returned in any prior full year in the firm's history. We remain committed to returning capital to shareholders while maintaining a strong and durable balance sheet, allowing for financial flexibility to support continued investment in our business. Lastly, our third quarter adjusted diluted share count was 43.5 million shares, down nearly 1.2 million shares year over year. We are pleased with our record performance through the first nine months of this year. While we remain mindful of market uncertainty, we are optimistic about Evercore's medium and long-term growth prospects. With that, we will now open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now conduct the question and answer portion of the conference. Please limit to one question only. You are welcome to rejoin the queue for additional questions. Time permitting. Again, in order to ask a question, please press the star key followed by the one on your touchtone phone. Our first question today comes from Mike Brown with UBS. Your line is now open.

Mike, just before you hop on. Mike, just one second. First of all, we apologize. Our understanding is that there was an issue with the connection to the webcast. We very much apologize for that. The replay as well as the transcript should be posted live just right after this call. So, again, we very much apologize for the inconvenience. Michael, I'll turn it back to you.

Okay, great. Thanks, Katy. So, good morning, John. Good morning, Tim. Just wanted to maybe start on the large-cap strategic M&A. That's been a key area of strength this year, as you've talked about in the prepared remarks. I guess intuitively, there's maybe a finite number of transactions that can play out in that space. So, just curious how you think about, is it possible to continue to see growth from this cohort here? Because obviously, the U.S. regulatory backdrop remains quite favorable. So, maybe... Can you talk about your confidence that activity can continue to accelerate from here? Maybe just touch on what your view is in terms of the inning that we're in in terms of large-cap M&A cycle.

Thanks, Mike. Well, it's always difficult to call a cycle. Having said that, what we can tell you is what we're seeing in our business. And what we see is that we have record backlogs. Our replenishment rates are very healthy. and client engagement is really at a very high level. We're feeling very, very good about really our client engagement and our breadth of engagement with respect to across all of the different sectors. We expect activity to remain healthy into next year. The building blocks are in place for really the continued strength in the merchant market. Those building blocks, as we've talked about many times in the past, are the CEO confidence level. access to capital, healthy equity markets, and really strategic impetus. So from our perspective, we see that strength will continue, and we feel good about the prospects going forward.

All right, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jiv Mitchell with Seaport. Your light is now open.

Hey, good morning. So SMD headcount's up 32% over the past two years. You've got more than 50 SMDs in ramp mode. So assuming the ramping SMDs can kind of match average productivity of the more seasoned bankers, how should we think about the amount of revenue productivity that remains to be generated out of that group? Is it sort of two-thirds, half? Just any kind of help in how much productivity you expect out of that 50%?

S&D Cohort. Thanks.

Yeah, sure, Jim. Happy to address it. So as you think about the 50, you know, you can get a sense probably from our press releases and so forth about when they started. And the way we normally think about it is it's difficult to do, you know, given when people arrive during the course of the year, difficult to do much revenue at all in that first what I would call stub year. The second year, you know, which is that maybe their first full year, you could expect to see them at, let's call it, 50% to two-thirds. And then by the second full year, they should be fully ramped. And so, you know, if you look at our revenue per partner productivity statistics over the last five years, the average has been about $22 billion. It's been particularly good so far in the last four quarters. at about $27.3 million. And so, you know, by the way, just as a side note, what I might say is that's especially encouraging to me given the rates at which we've grown our S&D headcount to be able to do so and retain those high and actually growing levels of productivity while we're doing it. Okay, that's helpful. Thanks.

Thank you. We'll go next to Brennan Hawken with BMO. Your line is now open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Tim, what's the right way we should be thinking about comp ratio for the year? I know you've spoken about less comp leverage than the preceding years. When we look at the year-to-date, you're at 63.5, I believe, on an adjusted basis. Did that align with your expectation, or should we be more centered or focused on what you just printed here in 3Q as an indicator? I know sometimes it can switch.

Yeah, sure, Brennan, and thanks for the question. You know, I'd just like to remind our investors, you know, 2023 was the comp ratio was 67.6, then we brought it down to the 65.7 in 24 and 64.2 in 25. And then this year, as you correctly mentioned, year-to-date comp ratios on an adjusted basis, 65%, but what we booked for this quarter, or pardon me, 63.5%, but what we booked for this quarter is 63%. And so we have made pretty substantial progress From an accounting standpoint, if you looked at our year-to-date, that would reflect an accrual that's our best estimate of the full year, although what I would note is we continue to strive hard to reduce that, and I'm encouraged by the progress I've seen recently and hopeful that we can make additional progress.

Great. Thanks for taking my question.

Thank you. We'll go next to Steven Chubak with Wolf Research. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning, John and Tim, and thanks for taking my question. So I wanted to double-click into the digital infra opportunity. The Broadcom debt advisory mandate is certainly encouraging to see, just given the market perception that the M&A independents are not as well-positioned to participate in the digital infra capital markets fee pool, given the inability to extend balance sheets. Given the magnitude of financing activity as anticipated to support the build and expectations for issuance activity to remain elevated at least for the next five plus years, I was hoping you could speak to how the debt advisory backlog is trending and how would you frame the size of the revenue TAM for which you can compete?

Well, from our perspective, really our capability in terms of driving infrastructure financing and really thinking about the advisory on debt financing and liability has really been somewhat of a new muscle for us. And we've built it out extensively over the last two or three years. And we're feeling really good about it. As you said, the Broadcom deal was something that really was a, you know, a very strong deal. I think we were very happy with that result. We have driven Nexus data centers of $15.6 billion financing. of its inaugural data center to really pronounce their power. We see a number of these activities and these opportunities coming down the pike. I wouldn't really give you a projection as to where we're going to be on that other than to say the fact that we're able to do this and we are starting to really build momentum, it's clear. that really people are looking to Evercore and our brand and really the way we do business that you can assume that there is a significant buildup of possibilities and activities and we're in the middle of looking at a lot of those. And so, you should just assume that that area is going to grow, that we feel that we've really built that area well with very strong people. and we think it's going to be a very high potential area for us going forward.

That's great, Paul. Thanks for taking my question.

Thank you. We'll go next to Devin Ryan with Citizen Bank. The line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning, John. Good morning, Tim. The question on the connection in financial sponsor investments and private capital coverage and then also some of the commentary on The investments into the middle market coverage, which I know are active for sponsors. Thanks, Devin. Thanks, Devin.

Well, clearly sponsors is picking up slowly in the general market. There is a trend upward, but it is slow. We feel like we're seeing above market volume build because we've spent a tremendous amount of effort and time really thinking about how do we cover sponsors? How do we leverage off of all the capabilities we have? How do we make sure that we are in effect driving our connectivity with relationships and so I think probably we're ahead of that and going forward as we said what's really happened is we covered sponsors better and we're really in effect able to satisfy more of their needs. Having said that your question was also about the middle market and our build there and really that's been a pretty comprehensive effort over a number of years now for us and just recently we've added two very senior people in A&D who are very, very facile with respect to middle market area and covering. We've really added in the business services. We've added in logistics. And we continue to see people who are in these areas who want to come over because our platform is strong and they're able to do a lot of things. I mean, I think that one of the things I think we've really been able to build as a firm is Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is just to reiterate a point that John made in his prepared remarks, which is that in the financial sponsor area, we now have over 60 senior bankers across both our financial sponsor coverage and our private capital advisory business covering this, which I think is probably a lot more than what people might assume that we've seen. Our pitch activity has increased, and our win rate has strengthened. And so, you know, we are pleased with the progress we've seen in that area. And then, you know, as John said, you know, we certainly have made an intentional and concerted effort to broaden our reach in the middle market as well and feel like we're much better positioned in that area than we would have been just a few years ago.

Yeah, it's certainly an area of focus and investment for us.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And once again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star and one on your keypad now. We'll go next to James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Good morning, and thanks for taking the question. I wanted to touch on a little bit of a higher level question here. Could you just speak to the impact of whether currently more financing heavy capital market activity is impacting independent advisor firm market share temporarily? and more broadly have the structural market share gain story among independent advisory firms changed more recently versus let's say the prior roughly 15 years or so?

Well let me answer that question a little bit more narrowly because I'm going to really answer it from Evercore's perspective and then maybe you can extend it beyond which is From our perspective, we do see that there is more activity and much larger activity going forward, and the financing is a big part. As you have seen, we've really built out our capabilities there. And the way we think about the extent of our business or the limits of our business is it really, really has to do with the clients we're covering and the way we're able to really access the opportunities with those clients. We're seeing... and many, many more. and so I think what we're looking at is really driving that and also using the financing capabilities that we've generated to really take advantage of the opportunity set. So, James, from our perspective, we're seeing multiple opportunities and we feel like we're in a very good position. In terms of the broader landscape, I couldn't really say. Certainly, we have competitors out there who are very capable. so I anticipate that a lot of them are going to see some of the benefit of this growth also.

Right. Just to put a little bit of detail on some of what John said, we do track what we consider to be a form of market share which is just the advisory revenues of all the publicly traded investment banking firms that report advisory revenues and based on that I feel like, you know, Evercore is perhaps outperformed on that measure and, in fact, would rank right in the mix, if not above the market share gains you've seen by the bulge bracket firms. Thanks a lot. That's very clear.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Bond with KBW. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to follow up on some of the commentary around the non-comp side. I think last quarter, Tim, you had spoken to your expectation that the year-over-year increase there on the non-comp expense side would be up modestly relative to last year. Is that still the case? And then maybe just a quick one on 3Q revenues. I think you had also mentioned that over the trailing 12 months, the non-M&A contribution was roughly 40%. in the advisory line. Was that the case in 3Q specifically, or was that a little bit higher? Thank you.

Yeah, and so let me start with the non-comp question. And so, you know, just for all the listeners, just remind people that the non-comp ratio for the quarter is 14.1%. For the year to date, it's 13.7%. And so, of course, that's down substantially from last quarter, about 340 basis points. And for the year to date, it actually is lower than what we experienced last year as well. And I know I had talked about on previous calls trying to target a non-comp ratio that was in the vicinity of last year's Last year, just to remind people, it was 14.2%. And it looks like we're striving to achieve that. Maybe something a little better. We'll see. And I think what we feel good about is we feel good about the fact that we've made the necessary investments in our business both on the technology side and then on the general infrastructure side to support the growth we've been experiencing. And so as I mentioned on the call, our revenues over the last three years have doubled while our non-comp ratio has declined from 16.6% in 2023 to the 14.1% you see this quarter and 13.7% year-to-date. So We're feeling better, I would say, about our positioning on the non-comp ratio side. And then, pardon me, your other question on non-M&A revenues, we look at it because the results bounce around from quarter to quarter. So we look at it on a trailing four-quarter basis. And on the trailing four-quarter basis, we're still a little above 40%. Now, what's particularly interesting Please think to me about that is that we're doing that in the context of an M&A market, which has improved quite a bit. So you would have expected to see that, you know, come down quite significantly. But due to the success of our non-M&A businesses, they've been able to kind of keep pace so far during this part of the cycle.

Very helpful. Next up.

Thank you. We'll go next to Ryan Kenney with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning. Wanted to dig in a bit on the movement in interest rates that we've seen over the last quarter. Are you seeing any impact in client conversations, particularly on the sponsor side, from higher rates? And is this time more manageable than what we saw in 2022 to 2023 because that cycle was a much faster pace off of zero in this one? feels a little more manageable?

What we're seeing is that dialogues and opportunities are not changing given interest rates at this time. Clearly, if interest rates accelerate up or if there are more radical situations or volatility, that may change. But right now, we're seeing it to be consistent. And it really remains that the really high-quality assets are very, very able to move. and the ones that are kind of less high quality are not. And, you know, one of the things that will impact sponsors, as we all know, is that there's a maturity wall coming up at, you know, 2028 and 2029. And if rates are high, we can see that there will be more activity in areas like restructuring. But at this time, what we are seeing is that things are actually pretty consistent. and activity levels are really going as they were. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Nathan Stein with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Hey, everyone. Good morning. So intra-quarter, there was some talk surrounding a potential merger of two of your competitors. So with that in mind, my question is, generally speaking, how are you all thinking about M&A right now as we're about a year post the Roe v. Warshaw deal close?

At this time, we do not see any opportunities for us. We clearly will always look at the landscape, but really our custom and what we do is we hire people one by one. and so we are not looking for another deal to do. Honestly, we're being very focused on what we actually think we do well, which is really day-to-day business with clients. Roe v. Warshaw was a really outstanding opportunity for us. They were an extraordinary group of people who we have a great deal of respect for and had known a long time and it was a really good fit for us and that opportunity has gone very well. but I think you should really, if you're thinking about us, I think you should really assume that we're not going to be doing something. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Gabriel Angelini with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good morning. On the topic that was just raised, I think there's been a fair amount of disruption across the industry recently, including the merger that was mentioned, and not asking you to comment on that situation specifically, but can you speak to how you've positioned Evercore to navigate uncertainty, whether that be taking advantage of strategic disruption at peers or navigating dislocation from a macro perspective? Thank you.

Well, actually, we're just going to stick with what we do, which is we have a strategy that The strategies to cover more clients, expand our client base. It's to add products so that we can really service those clients better and to really be focused on what are the areas of growth throughout the economy and make sure that we are actually participating in those areas of growth. And we're going to stick with that. And I think we feel like really no matter what the environment would be, that's going to afford us real opportunities and allow us to grow Thank you.

And as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star and one on your keypad now. And we'll take a follow-up from Brennan Hawken with BMO. Your line is now open.

Good morning again. Thanks for taking the follow-up. The revenues were rather substantially stronger than the public data suggested. Could you speak to either the level of non-M&A activity that you saw or whether or not there was a substantially notable level of pull-forwards that impacted this quarter, just as we think about tactically how to frame fourth quarter and finishing up the year? Thanks.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for the question, Brennan.

With respect to the non-M&A activity, I think I would characterize it as follows. Restructuring remains strong. The equity capital markets business has experienced a nice increase this year and a nice year-over-year increase for the quarter. John talked at some length about our debt advisory business which is also working quite well right now and so I would say and of course there's our equity sales and commission and our wealth management and PCA all of those businesses are performing well and we're pleased with that and so in a nutshell I think the non-M&A businesses are just almost across the board performing at strong levels. With respect to the full forwards, the full forwards this quarter were actually lower than normal. And, you know, one notable transaction, which was, of course, Warner Brothers Discovery, closed on October 6th. And so that would fall in our fourth quarter revenues, not third quarter.

Great. Thanks for that. Is it okay if I ask one more, or do you want me to re-cue? Go ahead. Great. You guys also announced a leadership change, which I thought was really interesting. I don't recall any precedent around this. So, Nigel is obviously someone who runs a really important business, would love to, and so great to see that. Could you maybe help us contextualize what the right way we should think about this new role for Evercore and what this means in your progression as an organization? Thank you.

Sure, absolutely. So really, as we look out at the landscape and really our growth in that landscape, we see that there is so much more scale, complexity, Global Reach that is really required for us to do what our aspiration is for our firm. As a result, one of the things that really we concluded is that a leadership structure which allowed us to give additional management capacity and leadership to the opportunities at hand would actually be good for us. Frankly, from my perspective, having real support in terms of looking globally at all the things that we can accomplish is going to help immensely. Our leadership has always and will always be very much grounded in the client business. So you can assume that Nigel and Naveen will both spend significant amounts of their time out with clients and driving the businesses. Nigel's going to continue to be chairman of PCA, and Naveen's going to be very closely involved with investment banking and continue to be one of our leading deal people in investment banking and I obviously will continue what I do, which is to get involved with clients and really try to get involved with our people, with those clients. And so you're going to see a lot of that. Frankly, it was the right time for us to add some senior leadership because we really felt like we could do with the capacity. And it allows us to give even more focus to collaboration and bringing our businesses together. So from our perspective, this was the right time. and I think we've got the right people to be addressing the issues of really helping us expand our business. That's great.

Thanks for that. Congratulations to them both. Appreciate the color.

Thank you. We'll go next to Jim Mitchell with Seaport. Your line is now open.

Hey, sorry to prolong this, but just maybe a quick question on seasonality.

Typically, you do have quite a bit the fourth quarter from PCA, POG, and M&A and other drivers. So you did have a very strong third quarter. Should we sort of temper that sort of seasonal expectation or how should we think about the typical seasonal move? Yeah, look, what I would do is refer back to John's commentary and some of what I would call our joint consistent commentary for the last several quarters, which is the backlogs, you know, are strong. In fact, this quarter, we noted that they are record backlogs. Activity levels are very healthy. And, you know, we believe that all of that will give us momentum into next year. But I want to stay away from predicting timing of when that backlog will be realized.

Perfectly fair. Thanks.

Thank you. And we'll go next to James Yarrow with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Thank you for taking the follow-up. I was hoping that you might be able to update us on your equity capital markets outlook in light of your comments around strong ECM earlier in the quarter. I think that was in your prepared remarks. Within that answer, could you also perhaps comment on the ECM backdrop within healthcare specifically?

Sure. Healthcare in the earlier part of the quarter was very strong for us, and we continue to look upon that as being an area of strength in our equity capital markets business. We think there's been a slowdown in some of the IPO activity going into the fourth quarter, but we really wouldn't predict that. We would say, though, that we continue to spend a lot of time and have a very strong focus on really all the sectors that we cover in equity capital markets. We feel like that's a real area of growth for us. We actually feel like we are really very well positioned to add and create value for clients. And so we're going to continue to attack those areas. I think you can assume that we will participate healthfully in that area as it goes forward. We think the market may begin to pick up again, given some of the very recent success. But I think that for us, it's going to be a little bit of a wait and see to see how that goes forward. Very clear. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This does conclude today's question and answer session, as well as the Evercore third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.