While we Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement, it’s not that we don’t save at all. And by and large, we sock our money into mutual funds. According to data from Morningstar, investors poured more than $160 billion into mutual funds last year and have nearly $14 trillion invested.

A range of firms compete tooth-and-nail for this massive pot of money, and Aggressive Portfolio holding AllianceBernstein Holding is one of the most successful. It’s capturing an increasingly bigger share of it, helping to fund its 7.6% dividend yield.

In addition to serving retail investors, whose cash accounts for about a third of the company’s $474 billion of assets under management, the company also serves institutional investors (50% of AUM) and high-net-worth private clients (16%).

Turnaround Story

Formed in 2000, when Alliance Capital acquired Bernstein, there was a culture clash between the two companies, which came to a head when the dot-com bubble burst and the Alliance side of the business was caught up in the market-timing scandal of 2003.

Even as the company was still reeling from those troubles, it loaded up on financial-services stocks, which nosedived during the Great Recession, causing its investment products to lag the market and competitors’ performance. As its products lagged, many clients—and their money—left.

While you shouldn’t pin too much importance to any single person in an organization of nearly 3,500, it’s tough to overstate the key role played by Peter Kraus in turning the company around. Kraus, chairman and CEO, took over in 2008 and immediately began improving investment performance.

As he has smoothed over the rough cultural edges between what were still essentially two organizations under one roof, the company’s investment performance has soared. About 80% of the company’s bond funds outperform their peers on an annualized three-year basis, and about 70% of its stock offerings show similarly superior performance. As a result, while asset flows are still lumpy from quarter to quarter, the company has had more quarterly inflows than outflows since the final quarter of 2012.

He’s also fleshed out the firm’s investment menu, picking up smaller investment companies with complementary businesses. That’s a major reason why AllianceBernstein has been able to roll out more than 140 new services over the past few years, many of which are truly new, rather than simply twists on existing products. One of those new areas of service is private lending; the company essentially makes direct loans to borrowers for everything from commercial and residential real estate to infrastructure projects.

That’s actually not a huge leap for the company, whose primary expertise is in bonds. While about a third of its assets are invested in stocks, more than half are in fixed income.

Considering that bonds are essentially loans, transitioning the firm’s bond expertise to analyzing the creditworthiness of other borrowers isn’t a big stretch.

That’s also a service that is important to insurance companies, such as the French insurer AXA, which along with its subsidiaries accounts for as much as 25% of AllianceBernstein’s assets under management.

The company also stands out from its peers thanks to its global diversification: While it’s based in New York City, it has operations in 22 countries. On top of that, more than half of its assets are invested outside of the U.S. and about a third of the money it manages comes from clients outside the country.

So while the company had a rough run between 2008 and 2012, it has shown a huge improvement over the past few years.

While full-year 2014 results haven’t yet been released, in 2013 both net income and earnings per share (EPS) posted year-over-year growth of better than 200%. While last year’s growth isn’t expected to be quite so explosive, EPS is expected to rise from $1.78 in 2013 to $1.83, hitting $2.09 this year.

That continued growth is good news for investors. Since Alliance-Bernstein is structured as a master limited partnership, it pays out almost all of its available cash flow to investors as dividends, so as earnings grow, so do payouts.

That also means that investors in the company receive a K-1 at tax time rather than a 1099, but the upside is that at least a portion of each distribution is considered a return of capital (ROC). ROC isn’t immediately taxable, serving to reduce your cost basis in the shares; it’s not taxed until your basis either reaches zero or you sell the shares.

As the company continues growing, thanks to new product rollouts and improving investment performance, AllianceBernstein is a Buy under $30.