You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: As we begin 2021, we remain cautiously optimistic with the vaccine rollout gaining traction that will emerge from the global pandemic this year.
I think it's only confirmed by the increased economic activity we're all seeing.
That said, risks do remain.
And if you're so inclined to follow along, I'm going to be speaking to the highlights slide, which is slide three.
Our investment in key capabilities and the tremendous focus on our clients continues to produce good momentum in our business.
We have now achieved nine straight months of net long-term inflows.
In the first quarter, net long-term inflows were $24.5 billion.
This is a record level of inflows for the firm.
Net -- this follows net long-term inflows of nearly $18 billion in the second half of last year, and this represents nearly a 9% annualized long-term organic growth rate, led by net flows into ETFs, continued strength in fixed income and net inflows into the balanced funds.
And as you can see on slide three, the key areas that were highlighted in January: we have scale, investment readiness and competitive strength drove the growth in the quarter.
These are areas where investment performance is strong.
We're highly competitive, and we're well positioned for growth.
Retail flows significantly improved in the quarter and were $21.2 billion out of $24.5 billion of the net long-term flows.
Our ETFs, excluding the Qs, generated net long-term inflows of $16.8 billion.
This is also a record for the firm, which contributed significantly to the $10 billion of net long-term inflows generated in the Americas.
Invesco's U.S. ETFs, excluding the Qs, captured 6.7% of the U.S. industry net ETF inflows.
This is more than two times our 3% market share.
Within private markets, we launched two CLOs, which raised $800 million.
And we remain focused on our alternative capabilities of space, where we also see the benefits of our MassMutual.
MassMutual has committed over $1 billion to various strategies, including providing a credit facility to one of our private market funds.
We had net long-term inflows of $6.5 billion within active fixed income.
And within active global equities, our nearly $50 billion developing markets fund, key capability acquired in the Oppenheimer transaction, saw $1.3 billion of inflows.
That said, there's still areas of improvement within active equities, where we continue to work and remain focused on those opportunities.
Net long-term inflows into Asia Pac were $16.7 billion in the first quarter, following $17 billion of net inflows in the second half of 2020.
The China JV launched nine new funds with $6.2 billion of net long-term inflows.
In addition, our solutions-enabled institutional pipeline has grown meaningfully and accounts for over 60% of our pipeline at the end of the quarter.
Allison will provide more information in a few minutes on the flows, the pipeline, the results for the quarter.
But I would note, we generated positive operating leverage, producing an operating margin of 40.2% for the quarter.
Strong cash flows being generated from our operations improved our cash position, resulting in no drawdown on our credit facility at quarter end, a quarter where we experienced seasonally higher demand on our cash flow.
The Board also approved a 10% increase in the quarterly dividend to $0.17 per share.
Given our historical investments in the business and our most recent efforts to further align our organization with our strategy, I'm confident, talent, capabilities, the resources and the momentum to drive -- to deliver for our clients and drive further growth and success.
Moving to slide four.
Our investment performance improved in the first quarter, with 70% and 76% of actively managed funds in the top half of peers on a five year and a 10-year basis, respectively.
This reflected continued strength in fixed income, global equities, including emerging markets equities and Asian equities, all areas where we continue to see demand from clients globally.
This transition more closely aligns our data to the investment performance data reviewed by our U.S. clients and is more consistent with how our peers reflect investment performance.
Additionally, we've expanded the population of AUM included in performance disclosures by about $150 billion for each period presented through the addition of benchmark-relative performance data for institutional AUM, where pure rankings do not exist.
This approach is used by certain of our peers, and we believe it more meaningfully represents the contribution of our institutional AUM to our performance metrics.
Moving to slide five.
You'll notice we reorganized our ending AUM and net long-term flow slides to group the ending AUM and net long-term flows together for each cut of our data by total, investment approach, channel, geography and asset class.
We believe this will better illustrate our flows in the context of our overall AUM for each category.
We ended the quarter with just over $1.4 trillion in AUM.
Of the $54 billion in AUM growth, approximately $25 billion is a function of increased market values.
Our diversified platform generated net long-term inflows in the first quarter of $24.5 billion, representing 8.8% annualized organic growth.
Active AUM net long-term inflows were $7.5 billion or 3.4% annualized organic growth rate.
In passive AUM, net long-term inflows were $17 billion or a 31.3% annualized organic growth rate.
The retail channel generated net long-term inflows of $21.2 billion in the quarter, an improvement from roughly flat performance in the fourth quarter, driven by the positive ETF flows.
Institutional channel generated net long-term inflows of $3.3 billion in the quarter.
Regarding retail net inflows.
Our ETFs, excluding the QQQ suite, generated net long-term inflows of $16.8 billion, including meaningful net inflows into our higher-fee ETFs.
Net ETF inflows in the U.S. were focused on equities in the first quarter, including a high level of interest in our SandP 500 Equal Weight ETF, which had $4 billion in net inflows in the quarter.
In addition to the SandP 500 Equal Weight ETF, we had five other ETFs that reported net inflows of over $1 billion each.
These six ETFs represented $10 billion in net inflows for the quarter.
It's also worth noting that our Invesco NASDAQ Next Gen 100 ETF, the QQQJ, surpassed the $1 billion AUM mark in the quarter following its inception in October of 2020.
This is on the heels of our successful QQQ marketing campaign and sponsorship of the NCAA Championship in the first quarter.
Looking at flows by geography on slide six.
You'll note that the Americas had net long-term inflows of $10 billion in the quarter, an improvement of $7.8 billion from the fourth quarter.
The improvement was driven by net inflows into ETFs, institutional net inflows, various fixed income strategies, and importantly, focused sales efforts.
Asia Pacific delivered one of its strongest quarters ever with net long-term inflows of $16.7 billion.
Net inflows were diversified across the region.
$9.4 billion of these net inflows were from Greater China, including $8.5 billion in our China JV.
The balance of the flows in Asia Pacific were comprised of $3 billion from Japan, $1.9 billion from Singapore and the remaining $2.3 billion was generated from several other countries in the region.
Net long-term inflows for EMEA excluding the U.K. were $3.7 billion driven by retail flows, including particularly strong net inflows of $1.2 billion into our Global Consumer Trends Fund, the growth equities capability, which saw demand from across the EMEA region.
ETF net inflows in EMEA were $1.6 billion in the quarter, including interest in a wide variety of U.S.- and EMEA-based ETFs.
Notably, we saw net inflows of $0.5 billion into our blockchain ETF and $400 million into one of our newly launched ESG ETFs in the quarter, the Invesco MSCI USA ESG Universal-Screened ETF.
And finally, the U.K. experienced net long-term outflows of $5.9 billion in the quarter driven by net outflows in multi-asset, institutional quantitative equities and U.K. equities.
Turning to flows across asset class.
Equity net long-term inflows of $9.8 billion reflect some of the capabilities I've mentioned, including the Developing Markets Fund, the Global Consumer Trends Fund and ETFs, including our SandP 500 Equal Weight ETF.
We continue to see strength in fixed income across all channels and markets in the first quarter with net long-term inflows of $7.6 billion.
This following net inflows of $8.2 billion in fixed income in the fourth quarter.
It's worth noting that the net inflows in the balanced asset class of $7.3 billion arose largely from China.
In alternatives, net long-term inflows improved by $4.1 billion due to a combination of inflows in senior loan, commodities and newly launched CLOs during the quarter.
Moving to slide seven.
Our institutional pipeline grew to $45.5 billion at March 31 from $30.5 billion at year-end.
The growth in the pipeline this quarter includes a large lower-fee passive-indexing mandate in Asia Pacific, assisted by our Custom Solutions Advisory team.
This is an opportunity for us to offer solutions-based differentiated passive investment to meet the needs of a key strategic client with the potential to expand the relationship over time with access to higher-fee opportunities.
We are also able to leverage our in-house indexing capabilities with this mandate.
Excluding this large mandate in Asia Pacific, the pipeline remains relatively consistent to prior quarter levels in terms of size, asset mix and fee composition.
While there's always some uncertainty with large client funding, we're currently estimating that between 50% and 65% of the pipeline will fund in the second quarter, including the large indexing mandate.
The funding of this mandate will also have a slight downward impact on our net revenue yield next quarter.
Overall, the pipeline is diversified across asset classes and geographies, and our solutions capability enables 61% of the global institutional pipeline and created wins and customized mandates.
This has contributed to meaningful growth across our institutional network, warranting our continuing investment and focus on this key capability.
Turning to slide eight.
You'll notice that our net revenues increased $23 million or 1.8% from the fourth quarter as higher average AUM in the first quarter was partially offset by $71 million decrease in performance fees from the prior quarter.
The net revenue yield excluding performance fees was 35.7 basis points, a decrease of 0.3 basis point from the fourth quarter yield level.
This decrease was driven by lower day count in the first quarter that negatively impacted the yield by 0.8 basis point and higher discretionary money market fee waivers that negatively impacted the yield by 0.3 basis point.
These negative impacts were partially offset by the positive impact of rising markets and net long-term inflows during the quarter.
Going forward, we do expect money market fee waivers to remain in place for the foreseeable future until rates begin to recover to more normalized levels.
Total adjusted operating expenses increased 0.7% in the first quarter.
The $5 million increase in operating expenses was driven by higher variable compensation as a result of higher revenue as well as the seasonal increase in payroll taxes and certain benefits, offset by the reduction in compensation related to performance fees recognized last quarter and savings that we realized in the quarter resulting from our strategic evaluation.
Operating expenses remained at lower than historic activity levels due to pandemic impact to discretionary spending, travel and other business operations that have persisted in the quarter.
Moving to slide nine, we update you on the progress we've made with our strategic evaluation.
As we've noted previously, we're looking across four key areas of our expense base: our organizational model, our real estate footprint, management of third-party spend and technology and operations efficiency.
Through this evaluation, we will invest in key areas of growth, including ETFs, fixed income, China, solutions, alternatives and global equities while creating permanent net improvements of $200 million in our normalized operating expense base.
A large element of the savings will be generated from compensation, which includes realigning our nonclient-facing workforce to support key areas of growth and repositioning to lower-cost locations.
The remainder of the savings will come through property, office and technology and GandA expenses.
In the first quarter, we realized $16 million in cost savings.
$15 million of the savings was related to compensation expense.
The remaining $1 million in savings was related to facilities, which is shown in the property office and technology category.
The $16 million in cost savings were $65 million annualized, combined with the $30 million in annualized savings realized in 2020, brings us to $95 million or 48% of our $200 million net savings expectation.
As it relates to timing, we still expect approximately $150 million or 75% of the run rate savings to be achieved by the end of this year, with the remainder realized by the end of 2022.
Of the $150 million in net savings by the end of this year, we anticipate we will realize roughly 65% of the savings through compensation expense.
The remaining 35% would be spread across occupancy, tax spend and GandA.
The breakdown for the remaining $50 million in net cost saves in 2022 will be similar.
With $95 million of the expected $150 million in net savings by the end of this year already in the quarterly run rate, the degree of net savings per quarter will moderate going forward.
In the first quarter, we incurred $30 million of restructuring costs.
In total, we recognized nearly $150 million of our estimated $250 million to $275 million in restructuring costs that were associated with this program.
We expect the remaining transaction cost for the realization of this program to be in the range of $100 million to $125 million over the next two years, with roughly 1/2 of this amount occurring in the remainder of 2021.
As a reminder, the costs associated with the strategic evaluation are not reflected in our non-GAAP results.
Our expectations are for second quarter operating expenses to be relatively flat to the first quarter, assuming no change in markets and FX levels from March 31.
We entered the second quarter with $1.4 trillion in AUM driven by net inflows and market tailwinds from the first quarter.
These tailwinds will have a modest impact on both revenues and associated variable expenses.
The impact on expenses will be offset by lower compensation expense related to seasonality in payroll taxes and benefits, plus incremental savings related to the strategic evaluation.
We also expect a modest increase in marketing-related expenses as the first quarter is typically the low point in marketing spend annually.
One area that is still more difficult to forecast at this point is when COVID-impacted travel and entertainment expense levels will begin to normalize.
With the rollout of vaccines, we believe we might begin to see a modest resumption of travel activity later in the second quarter and perhaps more in the third quarter.
Moving to slide 10.
Adjusted operating income improved $18 million to $503 million for the quarter driven by the factors we just reviewed.
Adjusted operating margin improved 70 basis points to 40.2% as compared to the fourth quarter.
Most importantly, our degree of positive operating leverage reflected in our non-GAAP results was 2 times for the quarter, underscoring our focus on driving scale and profitability across our diversified platform.
Nonoperating income included $25.9 million in net gains for the quarter compared to $31.9 million in net gains last quarter as higher equity and earnings primarily from increased CLO marks were more than offset by lower market gains on our seed portfolio as compared to the prior quarter.
The effective tax rate for the first quarter was 24% compared to 21.7% in the fourth quarter.
The effective tax rate on net income was higher in the first quarter primarily due to an increase in income generated in higher-taxing jurisdictions relative to total income.
We estimate our non-GAAP effective tax rate to be between 23% and 24% for the second quarter.
The actual effective tax rate may vary from this estimate due to the impact of nonrecurring items on pre-tax income and discrete tax items.
Turning to slide 11.
Our balance sheet cash position was $1.158 billion at March 31, and approximately $760 million of this cash is held for regulatory requirements.
Cash balances are impacted by the typical seasonal increases in cash needs in the first quarter related to our compensation cycle.
We also paid $117 million on a forward share repurchase liability in January.
In addition to using excess cash to reduce leverage, we seek to improve liquidity and our financial flexibility.
Despite the increased cash needs in the quarter, the revolver balance was 0 at the end of March, consistent with our commitment to improve our leverage profile.
Additionally, the remaining forward share repurchase liability of $177 million was settled in early April.
We also renegotiated our $1.5 billion credit facility, extending the maturity date to April of 2026 with favorable terms.
We believe we're making solid progress in our efforts to build financial flexibility and as such, our Board approved a 10% increase in our quarterly common dividend to $0.17 per share.
The share buybacks dating back to last year on slide 11, which reflects $45 million in the first quarter of this year, are related to vesting of employee share awards.
We remain committed to a sustainable dividend and to returning capital to shareholders longer term through a combination of modestly increasing dividends and share repurchases.
In summary, Marty highlighted the growth we've seen in our key capabilities and our continued focus on executing the strategy that aligns with these areas.
We're also executing on our strategic evaluation and reallocating our resources to position us for growth.
And finally, we remain prudent in our approach to capital management.
Our focus on driving greater efficiency and effectiveness into our platform, combined with the work we've done to build a global business with a comprehensive range of capabilities, puts Invesco in a very strong position to meet client needs, run a disciplined business and to continue to invest in and grow our franchise over the long term.

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quarterly dividend increase of 10% to $0.17 per common share.
net long-term inflows were $24.5 billion for q1 of 2021, compared to inflows of $9.8 billion in q4 of 2020.
$1,404.1 billion in ending aum at quarter-end, an increase of 4.0% over the prior quarter.
qtrly total operating revenues $1,659.7 million versus $1,598.9 million.

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