Recurring revenues rose 10%; adjusted earnings per share rose 13% and our sales teams delivered a 10th consecutive year of record sales.
In fiscal '21, we increased our level of investment on our internal platforms, completed the largest acquisition in our history, and returned nearly $250 million in capital to shareholders.
Yesterday, our Board approved an 11% increase in our annual dividend per share.
Our guidance calls for 12% to 15% recurring revenue growth, further margin expansion, 11% to 15% adjusted earnings per share growth, and another year of record sales.
ICS recurring revenue rose 11% in fiscal '21 to $2.1 billion, driven by both new sales and internal growth.
Equity stock record growth, which is our measure of the number of positions held by shareholders grew 26% in fiscal '21 including 33% in the seasonally strongest fourth quarter.
Looking at industry sectors; tech and consumer cyclical stocks are leading the growth with 42% and 37% growth respectively.
We're also seeing double-digit growth across virtually other sector including 33% growth in healthcare needs and 20% plus in basic materials and industrials.
After the initial COVID surge last spring, we invested in new distribution capacity to build incremental flexibility across our network, enabling us to seamlessly ensure that holders of more than 500 million positions got the communications they needed to participate in corporate governance.
We conducted almost 2,400 virtual shareholder meetings in fiscal '21, up from 1,500 a year ago.
We become the clear choice for America's leading companies with more than 75% of S&P 100 companies using Broadridge to host their annual meetings in 2021.
Capital Markets revenue grew 8% to $701 million, driven by new client additions and the acquisition of Itiviti, which has given us a new capability to drive innovation across the trade lifecycle.
We have more than 70 buy and sell side users in the platform and we're adding more every week.
And the average initiated trade is north of $3.5 million, indicating demand for increased liquidity in fixed income markets.
We also recently launched our Digital Ledger Repo platform and are averaging $35 billion worth of transactions daily, a number which will grow as more clients, including UBS, come onto the platform.
The biggest driver behind our 6% growth in Wealth & Investment Management revenues was revenue from new sales.
As we line around UBS' goals around sequencing, we're already rolled out Select Components and we expect to rollout the additional platform components over the next 18 to 24 months.
Lastly, I was pleased to see strong growth in our Investment Management technology revenues, which grew by 12%; strong revenue from sales of existing solutions; continued platform development; and new product additions.
Our strong backlog gives us visibility into new revenue over the next 12 to 24 months and we see continued position growth as new investors enter the market and current investors continue to diversify their portfolios.
The net result of strong fiscal year '21 results, continued execution against our growth strategy and an outlook for continued growth in '22 means that Broadridge is well positioned to deliver at the higher end of our three-year growth objectives including, 7% to 9% recurring revenue growth and 8% to 12% adjusted earnings per share growth.
Little in the past 12 months has been easy, but they have found the way to adapt to the new virtual environment.
Fiscal '21 recurring revenues increased 10% to $3.3 billion, driven by strong growth in both ICS and GTO.
That strong growth enabled us to make the near, medium and long-term investments in our technology platforms and our digital products while driving 60 basis points of AOI margin expansion for the year.
Higher revenues and higher margins drove 13% adjusted earnings per share growth to $5.66.
In the fourth quarter, revenues rose 15% year-over-year to $1.1 billion, driven by growth in ICS and the acquisition of Itiviti.
Adjusted operating income rose 4% as we continued our ongoing investments and adjusted earnings per share grew 2% to $2.19.
The momentum in our business driven by the trends in increased investor participation in digital solutions continued into the fourth quarter and helped Broadridge post another year of 10% recurring revenue growth.
Our recurring revenue growth was powered by 8% organic growth, which came in well above our 5% to 7% three-year growth objectives.
The combination of organic growth coupled with 2 points of growth from our acquisition of FundsLibrary and Fi360 in fiscal year '20, and then Itiviti in May, pushed our fiscal year '21 recurring revenue growth above our 7% to 9% objective as well.
ICS revenues grew by 17% to $719 million in the fourth quarter.
The biggest driver of that growth was in our regulatory business, which grew 27% to $381 million.
Fourth quarter stock record growth was 33% and mutual fund record growth was 11%, both key drivers of growth in regulatory.
For the full year, regulatory revenues rose 20%.
Issuer revenue also contributed to growth, rising 20% in the fourth quarter to $106 million and 21% growth for the full year.
Fund solutions lapped the drag from lower interest income and recurring revenue grew 7% in the fourth quarter.
Full year revenues rose 5% driven by the fiscal year '20 acquisitions mentioned earlier and revenue from net new business.
Customer communication revenues was down 1% in the quarter as declines in the low margin print revenue offset digital growth.
For the full year, customer communications revenue growth was slightly positive, but more importantly, higher margin digital revenues within customer communications grew by 15%.
Turning to GTO on Slide 11; GTO recurring revenues rose 10% to $346 million in the quarter driven by 18% growth in our Capital Markets business and 1% growth in Wealth & Investment Management.
Across both Capital Markets and Wealth, solid revenue growth from new business was offset by $7 million of lower license revenue, which declined as expected, and modestly lower trading volume.
Our acquisition of Itiviti closed in mid-May and contributed $29 million to revenue growth in the Capital Markets franchise.
For the full year, GTO revenues rose 7% to $1.3 billion, driven by 4 points of organic growth and 3 points from acquisitions.
Equity stock record growth rose to a record 26% in fiscal '21, well above the 6% to 8% trend in the past decade.
Fourth quarter proxy volumes which accounted for 55% of full year distributions benefited from 33% stock record growth.
Turning to trading volumes in the bottom of the slide, fourth quarter volumes slipped 1% driven by a combination of tough year-over-year comps and lower overall market volatility.
Trading volumes rose 12% for the full year.
Shifting to a view of growth drivers of recurring revenue on Slide 13, organic growth rose to 11% in the fourth quarter, driven by a combination of new sales and the seasonal impact of higher proxy volumes.
New sales contributed 6 points to growth with balanced contribution from both ICS and GTO.
Internal growth of 7 points was primarily driven by proxy volumes as is typically the case in our fourth quarter.
Acquisitions contributed 3 points, almost all of that came from Itiviti with only a modest contribution from our mid-June acquisition of AdvisorStream.
Client losses subtracted 2 points of growth in both the fourth quarter and for the full year, marking another year of 98% client revenue retention rates.
Total revenues rose a healthy 12% in the fourth quarter.
Recurring revenue was the primary contributor to that growth and Broadridge received a further boost from an uptick in event driven revenues as well as 2 points of growth from higher distribution revenue.
While higher distribution revenues contributed to our overall growth, their share of the full-year total revenues declined to 31%, down from 32% in fiscal year '20 and 38% five years ago.
Looking down the slide, event driven revenues rose $5 million year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $73 million, driven by higher proxy contest activity.
For the full year, event driven revenues rebounded from a cyclical low to a healthy $237 million.
And while there might be some quarterly cyclicality, we expect full year fiscal '22 event driven revenues to be approximately $220 million, in line with the fiscal year '15 through fiscal year '21 long-term average.
Turning to Slide 15, for the full year, adjusted operating income margin expanded 60 basis points to 18.1%, slightly ahead of our latest guidance and multi-year objectives.
AOI margin declined 180 basis points to 22.8% in the fourth quarter on the back of our planned fiscal year '21 investment spend.
I was especially pleased to see strong growth in our smaller sales, those under $2 million in annualized values which rose 11%.
Our sales performance pushed our overall backlog, a measure of past sales that have not yet been recognized into revenue, to $400 million, up from $355 million last year and steady at 12% of recurring revenue.
In fiscal year '21, we generated $557 million of free cash flow, up $58 million from fiscal year '20.
The biggest use of our cash was the $2.6 billion acquisition of Itiviti, which was completed in the fourth quarter.
We invested almost $300 million in continued platform build-outs, as we add to our capabilities across Wealth Management and Capital Markets, and another $100 million in capex and software development.
Total capital returned to shareholders was $248 million.
The 11% increase in our annual dividend approved by our Board was in line with our long-term 45% pay-out ratio policy and will increase capital returns in fiscal year '22.
As a result of the Itiviti acquisition, our total debt rose to $3.9 billion, up from $1.8 billion at the end of fiscal year '20.
Our leverage ratio at year end was 3.5 times.
We remain focused on an investment grade credit rating and target a 2.5 times leverage ratio by the end of fiscal '23.
We expect to grow recurring revenues by 12% to 15% in fiscal year '22.
That includes organic revenue growth of 5% to 7% with growth balanced across both ICS and GTO.
As Tim noted, we expect to complete the rollout of the full Wealth Management platform suite over the next 18 to 24 months and will begin to recognize revenues at that time.
We expect the contribution from acquisitions to add an additional 7 points to 8 points, with most of that coming from Itiviti.
Our more recent acquisitions of AdvisorStream, J&J and Alpha Omega should contribute less than $10 million combined to fiscal '22 recurring revenues.
Event driven revenues should, as I indicated earlier, be more in line with our fiscal '15 to '21 seven-year average level of approximately $220 million.
For modeling purposes, between recurring revenue, distribution and event-driven revenues, total revenue growth should be in the range of 9% to 13%.
We are expecting our adjusted operating income margin of approximately 19%, up from 18.1% in fiscal year '21, driven by a combination of incremental scale, digital, and efficiency gains as well as the addition of the higher margin Itiviti business.
Finally, we expect adjusted earnings per share growth to be in the range of 11% to 15%.
Included in our earnings per share outlook is an expectation that our tax rate will essentially be flat at approximately 21% and that we'll see a modest increase in our overall share count.
Our outlook calls for closed sales in the range of $240 million to $280 million.
The difference between the fixed internal rate and the actual rate are recorded in our FX revenue line, which was negative $132 million in fiscal year '21.

Summary:
Our guidance calls for 12% to 15% recurring revenue growth, further margin expansion, 11% to 15% adjusted earnings per share growth, and another year of record sales.
Adjusted operating income rose 4% as we continued our ongoing investments and adjusted earnings per share grew 2% to $2.19.
We expect to grow recurring revenues by 12% to 15% in fiscal year '22.
Finally, we expect adjusted earnings per share growth to be in the range of 11% to 15%.