Base fees, or what BlackRock collects from fund investors excluding the impact of market moves, rose at an annualized rate of 10%. That exceeded the long-term growth target set by Larry Fink, the money manager’s chief executive.

The fee growth was driven by investors’ insatiable appetite for exchange-traded funds as well as BlackRock’s push into a new frontier: private markets. This quarter’s results were the first to include results from HPS Investment Partners, the private-credit firm that capped off Fink’s $30 billion deal spree aimed at transforming BlackRock into a big player in private equity, private debt and other so-called alternative investments.

Net income fell 19% to $1.32 billion, or $8.43 a share. Excluding certain acquisition-related expenses, BlackRock earned $11.55 a share. On that basis, the results bested Wall Street’s expectations.

Alternatives like private credit, real estate and infrastructure command higher investment fees from pensions, endowments and other large institutional clients. And like other big private-markets firms such as KKR and Blackstone, BlackRock is betting it will be able to sell these funds to more individual investors in the coming years.

At an investor conference in June, BlackRock executives outlined plans to become a do-everything money manager and set an ambitious target of raising $400 billion for their private-market funds by 2030. Many traditional stock and bond managers have sought to break into the adjacent world of private assets, though none have done so on the scale that BlackRock has built.

BlackRock’s private-markets businesses had $320.9 billion in assets at the end of September.

Nevertheless, low-cost funds that track market benchmarks like the S&P 500 remain the company’s bread and butter. BlackRock’s multitrillion dollar iShares ETF business is the industry’s biggest. And one of its newer offerings, the iShares Bitcoin Trust, has amassed nearly $100 billion in assets in less than two years since launch.