This month, MFI interviews BlackRock's Global Head of Cash Management Tom Callahan. He discusses a number of issues in the money market fund space, including the outlook for 2020, technology, ESG, European money funds and more. Our Q&A follows. (Note: The following is reprinted from the January issue of Money Fund Intelligence, which was published on Jan. 8. Contact us at info@cranedata.com to request the full issue or to subscribe. Also, for those attending Crane's Money Fund University, which takes place Thursday and Friday morning, welcome to Providence! Attendees and Crane Data subscribers may access our conference materials at the bottom of our "Content" page or our via our Money Fund University 2020 Download Center. Feel free to drop by the Providence Renaissance if you're in town!)
MFI: Give us some history. Callahan: BlackRock's Cash business is actually older than BlackRock itself. You can trace our history back to 1973 when TempFund was launched by Provident National Bank. In '95, when PNC made an investment in BlackRock, they merged their entire fixed income business, including their money funds, into BlackRock. Cash has been a core, critical part of BlackRock’s franchise since the firm was founded.
For my own history, I came to BlackRock in 2013, by way of Merrill Lynch and the New York Stock Exchange. When I joined, the Cash management industry was plagued by zero interest rates, outflows and fee waivers. Back then, BlackRock's cash management business had roughly $250 billion. Now, 5 1/2 years later, we have enjoyed terrific growth, much of it organic. As we announced in our last earnings report, in mid-2019 we crossed our long-term goal of $500 billion in total client cash management assets, and we've kept growing! It's been a great run and a lot of fun.
MFI: What are your big priorities? Callahan: Let me start with technology and then talk a little bit about LEAF. They're both absolutely critical, and I believe are indicative of the profound changes happening industry-wide right now. Competition around technology is heating up in a very healthy way. I think this was really precipitated by Money Fund Reform in 2016, when we saw $1 trillion move out of Prime funds. The cash management industry has always been a relatively commoditized business, but when essentially 80% of the assets in the industry moved into government funds, it became hyper-commoditized.
That dynamic then intersects with the longer-term trends of clients' use of portals and intermediaries -- which are taking a larger percentage of the total volume in the industry every year. I think a lot of us, certainly at BlackRock, realized that we needed a different distribution strategy. That's what led us to acquire Cachematrix in 2017. In the last 12 months, other large providers have announced new investments in their own tech platforms. So, I think it's clear that the new competitive front in cash management is technology.
We believe that what clients care most about in cash is convenience. And the way to deliver convenience to clients is through technology. These tech-driven enhancements are ultimately going to benefit clients through enhanced ease of use, improved functionality, better transparency and ultimately lower fees. More recently, we acquired the NEX Treasury platform to try to expand in the European market. We're continuing to invest enormous amounts of time, energy and resources to making sure that we stay on the cutting edge of this technology transformation that's happening in cash management.
The second transformation that I think is underway in cash management is sustainability. ESG funds are quickly moving from being interesting fringe products to the mainstream. We launched the Liquid Environmentally Aware Fund, or LEAF, very early on in the movement, in April 2019, largely in response to client demand. Since launch, the LEAF family of funds has been incredibly successful. Across the four funds (U.S. domestic, plus offshore Dollar, Sterling and Euro), we're coming up on $8 billion in assets combined. We've really seen stunning growth in such a short period of time. What we've uncovered is that bringing values-based investing to cash is resonating with investors, frankly, even more than we even expected.
We built our LEAF funds to be a no brainer. They are priced and perform nearly identically to the traditional options. So if you can buy a large, liquid, diversified money fund that is green, offers benefits in terms of sustainability, all while getting nearly the same return that you would get in a traditional cash product, we think that is an incredibly compelling value proposition. LEAF has some other features that help make this fund truly unique. A partnership with World Wildlife Fund helps support their ongoing conservation efforts and helps us make better investment decisions. We also take 5% of the revenue of the fund to buy and retire carbon offsets.... It seems like every month there are new funds announced and if we look out three or four years, ESG funds will be the default, not the exception in cash.
MFI: What are your biggest challenges? Callahan: I would say our biggest challenge, and luckily it plays to all of our strengths, is just managing scale. If you add up all of our client assets and also the funds that we manage for other BlackRock products, we're now managing over $800 billion and our yearly trading volume is measured in the tens of trillions. Doing that in an efficient, scalable way that relies on technology and doesn't expose us to any undue risk, that's our biggest challenge today.
Most of the inflows that you saw in 2019 went to the largest players. In a way, it almost appears to me that the industry is organically consolidating -- i.e., there is such a huge preference from clients for big, scaled funds that those funds are naturally attracting most of the new money. So the big are getting bigger which, fortunately, offers advantages to clients in terms of liquidity and diversity. But what it means for us as a provider is that we need to be constantly investing in our systems and our platforms to be as efficient as we can. Luckily, our global business is built on the Aladdin platform, which is the best investment technology and risk management platform in the industry.
MFI: How are you positioning the funds? Callahan: In terms of positioning of the portfolios, generally we think that the risk is to lower yields. [A] new geopolitical risk has arisen, and the market really hasn't changed its pricing in terms of Fed expectations, with only one cut currently priced in for 2020. We've seen that the Fed is willing to cut rates at any sign of an economic slowdown. We think given where we are in the business cycle and where risk assets are priced, there is a very asymmetric risk towards lower rates.
Fortunately, to help us manage through this risk, we think we have some of the best PMs in the business. Rich Mejzak is our global cash CIO and he's been here since the MLIM days. On the government fund side, Joe Markowski, Eion D'Anjou, Chris Linsky and team are fantastic. They were here through the crisis, [and] reforms in '16. [W]e are very lucky to have that steady hand in Philadelphia investing our clients' assets.
MFI: Any customer concerns? Callahan: The number one concern we hear from clients is managing their own time and bandwidth. I think since the financial crisis, the role of the corporate treasurer and the definition of what that job encompasses has expanded three-or-four-fold. Ultimately, what our corporate treasurer clients care about more than anything is convenience. They don't want to have to stress about the task of cash investing. They want it to be effortless [and] integrated with other tools ... like TMSs. They want automation. They want sweeps. They want to 'set it and forget it.' That's why we're investing in technology the way that we are and I think that's why the industry is moving so aggressively in this direction.
MFI: What about fees and waivers? Callahan: If you look across the industry, I think cash management has been more resistant to fee compression than some other sectors of the asset management industry. I think there are a couple of reasons behind that. One of them, again, is that scale in cash is just so critical. The other are the various hidden taxes money fund investors are paying currently in terms of distribution fees. Most money fund providers pay in certain distribution networks over half their management fee to their distributors, which ultimately reduces the return investors earn. I think that as technology evolves and as greater competition is created in the distribution, buying and selling of money funds, a lot of those implied fees and tolls will be reduced. That's what technology does. It eliminates fees and reliance on middlemen. So, I do think you will see distribution fees drop due to technology and then you will see money fund fees drop commensurately as well.
MFI: What about ultra-short or offshore? Callahan: 2019 was a year where every single sector you just mentioned saw record or near record inflows. Our core Government funds, our Prime funds, our LEAF funds, our SMAs, all grew across both onshore and offshore. I think the offshore story is really an incredible one. This time last year we were all in the teeth of European Money Fund Reform and there was a huge amount of uncertainty. The fact that not only did we not see outflows in our funds but we actually hit new record highs was one of the great successes of 2019. We also saw fantastic growth of our SMA book in EMEA and APAC.
We have a fund called Short Obligations, which is our U.S. Ultra-Short Bond Fund. For us, it's a high net worth product that two years ago had $200 million in assets. It crossed $3 billion last year. For high net worth clients looking to get a slightly enhanced return on their cash by accepting floating NAV and going out a few months in duration, it has proved to be a homerun product, especially in a declining yield environment. It was another really strong performer for us in 2019.
MFI: What about the future? Callahan: I think that the industry has enormous room to continue to grow. I'm very, very bullish on the future of money funds. 2019 was a spectacular year for the industry and it was a terrific double-digit growth year for BlackRock's cash management business. It's not a surprise when you look at the shape of the yield curve, overall volatility in the markets, M&A activity, etc., all of those things kind of conspired together to create an ideal environment. Clients could earn, for much of 2019, 2.25-2.5% in a money fund, while the 10-year Treasury was yielding 1.60%.
I think for a lot of investors that was a no brainer. It was a really positive year for the industry. As great as 2019 was, I believe there is room for even more growth in 2020. You could make an argument that the cash management industry could double again in the coming years, which is exciting.
I firmly believe that transformative technology is going to be that growth accelerant. It's going to make money market funds cheaper, easier to use and more transparent. It's going to diminish or eliminate all the headaches of account setups and complexity around buying and selling of money funds. The lesson of the digital economy is when you make things easier to buy and sell, people buy and sell more of them.
