Paul Reilly
Chair and Chief Executive Officer at Raymond James
Thank you, Kristie. Good evening and thank you for joining us today. Before I discuss our fourth quarter and fiscal year earnings, I want to start by acknowledging the heartbreaking devastation our associates, advisers, friends and neighbors experienced over the last several weeks. With hurricanes, Helene and Milton impacting communities throughout the Southeast, including the St. Petersburg, Tampa Bay area where Raymond James is headquartered as well as the Carolinas and Georgias, thousands across the region experienced unprecedented flooding, power outages, property damage and devastation. We enacted our business continuity plans and with our service workforce almost equally distributed across offices in St. Pete, Memphis and Southfield Michigan, colleagues outside impacted areas stepped in to ensure continuous service coverage.
Even those affected associates and advisers continue to serve clients while facing storm and evacuations, often working remotely from safe locations. The storm left a long recovery road ahead of us for all of their path. And while it's been difficult to bear witness to the pain and loss, I have also been humbled by the resilience of our associates, advisers and our community. Following the hurricane, the firm and leadership team have contributed almost $11 million to associate and community relief, including stipends to eligible associates and donations, The Friends of Raymond James, the American Red Cross, the United Way Suncoast and other charitable organizations across impacted communities.
In addition to granting associates the time needed to navigate recovery efforts, the firm continues to provide comprehensive resources and benefits, including information about financial support, immediate aid, relocation services and wellness benefits. Challenging times like these highlight the importance of always putting people first, which has always been the foundation of Raymond James. The preparation perseverance and response to the storm reflect the long history of Raymond James service culture, and I'm especially proud to represent our team today.
Now moving to our quarterly performance. We achieved strong results once again, concluding another fiscal year with outstanding achievements. In fiscal 2024, we generated record net revenues and record net income, showcasing the strength of our diverse and complementary businesses. We ended the year with record client assets, healthy pipelines for growth across our business and ample funding to support the balance sheet. We remain well positioned to continue to invest in our business, our people and technology to help drive growth across all of our businesses.
Beginning on Slide 4. The firm reported record fiscal fourth quarter net revenues of $3.46 billion, net income available to common shareholders of $601 million and earnings per diluted share of $2.86. Excluding expenses related to acquisitions, adjusted net income available to common shareholders was $621 million or $2.95 per diluted share. We generated strong returns for the quarter with annualized return on common equity of 21.2% and annualized adjusted return on tangible common equity of 25.8%, a great result, particularly given our strong capital base. During the fiscal quarter, we repurchased 2.6 million shares of common stock for $300 million, bringing our fiscal year total to 7.7 million shares for $900 million at an average price of $117 per share. In total, we returned nearly $1.3 billion of capital to shareholders through a combination of share repurchases and dividends in the fiscal year.
Moving to Slide 5. Client assets grew to record levels this quarter, driven by rising equity markets and solid adviser retention and recruiting in the Private Client Group. Total assets under administration increased 6% sequentially to $1.57 trillion. Private Client Group assets and fee-based accounts grew to $875 billion in financial assets under management to $245 billion. Domestic net new assets during the quarter were $13 billion, representing a 4% annualized growth rate on the beginning of the period domestic PCG assets. And for the fiscal year, domestic net new assets were $60.7 billion, representing a 5.5% growth rate on beginning of the period domestic Private Client Group assets. A key contributor to the net new asset growth is our continued recruiting results, which were really strong this quarter.
To our domestic independent contractor and employee channels, we recruited financial advisers with approximately $100 million of trailing 12-month production and a $17.5 billion of client assets at their previous firms. Including assets recruited into our growing RIA & Custody Services division, which we refer to as RCS, we recruited across all platforms total client assets during the quarter of $22.3 billion, surpassing the previous best quarter, which occurred in 2021 in terms of recruited assets. For the fiscal year, we recruited financial advisers with approximately $335 million of trailing 12-month production and $56.7 billion of client assets at the previous firms. Recruiting in the year production and assets equal to that of a pretty good-sized firm. RCS asset growth is bolstered by both external joins as well as from internal transfers and RCS finished the quarter with $181 billion of client assets under administration, up 36% over the prior year level.
This quarter, we reported financial advisers of 8,787. Overall, these fantastic recruiting results reflect the continuous focus of the entire firm to ensure Raymond James remains a destination of choice for advisers. As we had mentioned in previous quarters, there are a couple of OSJ relationships in our independent contractor division who had decided to leave the platform. It takes time to affect these movements, but a portion of those assets left the firm in the fiscal fourth quarter totaling roughly $3 billion of AUA. We anticipate approximately $5 billion of assets associated with these firms to complete their transfers off the platform in early fiscal 2025. Adjusting for these transferred assets, net new assets growth in the quarter would have been approximately 5%.
Overall, we remain focused on serving advisers across our multiple affiliation options. Our robust technology capabilities and client-first values continue to enable us to retain and attract high-quality advisers. Total client domestic cash sweep and enhanced savings program balances ended the quarter at $57.9 billion, up 3% over June of 2024. Bank loans grew at 2% over the preceding quarter to a record $46 billion primarily due to higher securities-based loans, which grew 5% in the quarter as well as continued residential mortgage growth.
Moving to Slide 6. Private Client Group generated record quarterly net revenues of $2.48 billion and pretax income of $461 million. Year-over-year, results were bolstered by higher PCG assets under administration due to a strong equity market and net new assets brought into the firm, reflecting positive results from our long-term focus and patience to hold the course in our capital markets businesses generated quarterly net revenues of $483 million and a pretax income of $95 million. Net revenues grew 42% year-over-year and 46% sequentially, driven primarily by higher M&A revenues as the market environment became more supportive of transaction closings in the quarter.
Market conditions seem to be improving, and we are optimistic about our healthy pipeline and new business activity and M&A. The Asset Management segment generated record pretax income of $116 million on record net revenues of $275 million. Results were largely attributable to higher financial assets under management compared to the prior year quarter due to market appreciation and net inflows in PCG fee-based accounts as well as modest net inflows into Raymond James Investment Management. The bank segment generated net revenues of $433 million and pretax income of $98 million. Bank segment net interest income increased 1% due in part to higher loan balances. The net interest margin for the segment of 2.62% declined 2 basis points compared to the preceding quarter.
Looking at the fiscal year 2024 results on Slide 7, we generated record net revenues of $12.82 billion [Phonetic] and record net income available to common shareholders of $2.06 billion, up 10% and 19%, respectively, over the record set in the prior year. Additionally, we generated strong returns on common equity of 18.9% and adjusted return on tangible common equity of 23.3% for the year.
On Slide 8, the record results in PCG and Asset Management segments for the fiscal year primarily reflected a strong organic growth in PCG along with robust equity markets. Now I'll turn the call over to our new CFO, Butch Oorlog, to review our financial results in detail. Butch?
