State Street Corporation (STT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. For our next fireside chat, pleased to welcome Ron O'Hanley.

It's great to be here, Brennan.

Thanks for coming. Really appreciate it. Chairman and CEO of State Street, of course. Ron, when I was prepping up for the -- I was going through the financials. And last year was really a pretty awesome year for State. 6% core revenue growth, operating margin leverage that was pretty substantial, 200 bps, a bunch of new Alpha wins. It was really quite good. Now the market was conducive but you guys capitalized on it. So I know you've got your outlook out there. This isn't about your outlook. But when you think about 2025 and the next few years, what are the strategic imperatives that are most in [indiscernible] for you?

Maybe I'll come back to 2024, because when you think about 2025, that foundation and groundwork was laid in '24 and before and '24 the foundation was laid in '23. And I talked a little bit about that this time last year. But as you noted, 6% revenue growth, and that was really across the board. I mean, it was [indiscernible]. The components were good and broad, which reflected our strategic initiatives. So asset management revenue was up. Servicing revenue was up. Software revenue was up 10%. Private was up 11%. And most importantly, we really focused on these things, one is, service quality, and we had a retention rate of 97%, which was our target. And second, we focused on sales and asset management, $146 billion of net asset flow. And in servicing fees, $380 million. And as you know, that number has purposely gone up over the years, we've set increasingly higher targets. At the same time, we were very strategic about the way we thought about when opportunities came along and locked in longer-term kinds of contracts, we did that. So our pricing -- pricing eroded a little bit from 2% to 2.5%, but that was quite intentional. So we were able to secure these longer kinds of mandates as said in our guide, that will go up to 2%. That will be 2% for next year. So what does it all mean for '25 and beyond? We're really focused on three things: One is to continue to sustain revenue growth. And how are we going to do that? Again, across the board, like we've talked about before, the biggest piece of this is servicing fees. So everything we think about is, how do we keep that number. And what we said on servicing fees is we're talking about a 3% to 5% number for 2025. A couple of headwinds in there, so that's a net number. Some of those headwinds will die down, after next year. But as importantly, we're focused on these broader set of activities, which we think one represents the future, private, for example, run office software, which is a revenue stream that we have and our competitors don't have. We still are projecting a 10% growth rate there. So, first is fee revenue growth. Second is, how do we think about our operating model. And we think about our operating model and you immediately go to expenses there, and that's important, and that will enable us to continue to have the kind of moderate expense growth that we see. But as importantly, it's about the service quality we're delivering, faster, lower error rates, high client satisfaction that results in retention, and also an inclination for clients to grow more for us. And finally, continuing to reshape the culture. And we talk about this a lot. There's a lot of people that are new or new to their roles. We've talked about some of them. Some of them are very visible leaders such as [indiscernible]. But even more broadly, as we think about it, I just had my entire SVP and [ Op ] group. That's what we call the operating group, that's 500 people. So think of it as the top 1%. 24% of them are new or new to their roles since last year. So we continue to drive that kind of change into the organization. So when you put it all together, what we've said to our shareholders is that you can count on us for this kind of sustained revenue growth. And I know we've talked about this for a long time, we've had a lot we needed to do. It took us time to get alpha in place and to get that revenue growth engine going. We feel quite confident as we look forward.

Yes. Now you touched on -- that was a lot and that was great. You touched on 2% to 2.5% sort of pricing in order to get the longer term. Is that in line with what it normally is? Or is that a little more elevated because you were looking to extend?

So we normally talk about a 2%, but there were a couple of opportunities that arose in 2024, where for strategic reasons, we said we have an ability to actually extend duration much more than we normally would. That helps us defensively, but also gives us some predictability long term. But it was about 2.5% in '24, you should be thinking about 2% normally. And that's what our guide is for '25.

Yes, it's inclusive of that. So CRD Alpha, as it's been renamed. So it's become a really significant strategic imperative for you all and a differentiator, as you said. You've really proven the doubters wrong, present company included, right? But, in particularly, 6 to 8 mandate wins sort of the right pace, I believe that's your target. Do the 6 to 8 mandate wins translate to the low double-digit sort of revenue side? And then what's the right way to think about the TAM for that business? Because it's -- from what I understand, it's not -- it's an expensive -- it's a big project, right? So it does carry a decent expense. So there's probably a certain size threshold you have, right?

[indiscernible] You said a lot in that question, let me try and pick that apart a little bit. First of all, 6 to 8, that is what we talk about. And we've been hitting that over the last couple of years, with 7 last year. And the way to think about it is that, Alpha is just a much broader proposition with our clients. So it's more products, but it's beyond products. We now move to a different buying unit within our clients, right? It goes from being the back office kind of fund treasurer to, it's the -- certainly the Chief Operating Officer. Often, the mandate is being pushed by the Chief Executive Officer. He or she has said we need to do this. And then finally, we're very tied into the investment organization because if you think about it, if we're installing Charles River, it's a change out of literally the core desktop that's going on there. If it's not a change out, in other words, CRD is already there, but it's how everything works post freight. So typically, that's part of a reengineering that's going on in their own organization could be to and future-proof their technology or operations that could be to reduce [indiscernible]. So the result of all this is it's a much tighter relationship. It's not something that's easy to turn over, because one of the reasons the installs take time is because of the kind of change that's required at the client to make that change. And obviously, we need to continue to deliver, but they're not likely to change out any time in the near future. So these are longer duration contracts. And so far, they're all renewing over that duration.

Has it been 100%? I mean I know there's not as many clients compared to the whole of State Street and the servicing business, but...

Yes, we've retained them all .

Yes. Okay. That's great. Yes. And the point on going into the front office rather than the back. I mean that's something that I don't think everybody really fully has digested.

Yes. I think that's right. And also, we are differentiated, because the other front office providers are software-only. We're software plus services. That's a harder thing to do, but it's also much more valuable to the client. You asked about, is there a size limit? And early on, I would say, yes, there was because we were also developing in effect on the fly. But as we're making this platform a true core platform with configurability, our ability to go down market will actually increase -- and is increasing.

So it's basically you're scaling it.

Yes.

It's totally fair. And I'm actually sitting here with Andrew Scottburgh just yesterday, working on his out installed right now. Have you looked, though, at the impact of potentially pricing power or cross-sell opportunities across that? I know it's still early days, but are there any early indications or do you have any kind of goal as far as alpha penetration is concerned across the industry? [indiscernible] a different question.

There's absolutely more cross-selling. And certainly, the ideal alpha configuration as we have the front, the middle and the back office. And remember, the back office is the so-called commodity business, but it's also very, very scalable. And what we've shown is that Alpha has enabled us to actually drive back office business. One of our first Alpha installations was for a Swiss provider. We had no existing relationship with them. The conversation started around Alpha. And what they were trying to do for the, again, it was a classic kind of medium-sized investment manager had expanded its product base, its operations to become much more complex. We solved that problem, but also said that for us to do this effectively for you, we actually need the back office. So now we do front middle impact for them. Charles River upfront, our middle office and the back office. So that's number one. Number two, though, on cross-sell, there's even more in the future, because one of the things we're looking at now is we continue to populate on the CRD platform, things like our own fixed income and our Global Link platform, for example, to put that as an app on the Charles River on the Charles River screen. So it's very, very easy for clients to just say, okay, I've got a fixed income trade. I need to do it. Let me just do it now for a global link. So there's more and more of those kinds of things that we can do to, in effect, like any other platform, take this platform and offer more and more through it. And as long as the user interface stays easy for our clients, there's no reason why we can't see take-up in that area.

Does the bond offering allow -- do you have multi asset managers that are using it? Because I know CRD is always the strength -- is the equity side, right? But are you getting...

Yes. So that's -- I mean the history here is Charles River was the leading equity platform. Aladdin was a leading fixed income platform. The realities are -- these are the two biggest platforms out there. They've both invested broadly. So I would say there's broad comparability now, in both.

Got it. Last question on the strategic side. So I think Mark Keating is in the audience, if he is [indiscernible] for me for this one, Mark. But how is the process going? You've got an interim CFO Mark named. So got a solution for the moment, but you are considering internal and external candidates still, right? So what's the latest on that?

Yes. The search is going exactly as planned and is on time, right? So, we are looking internally and externally. And as you'd expect, this is something that we want to do comprehensively and want to do carefully. We're very pleased with the naming of Mark. Mark, as you know, has had a lot of roles both on the business and financial side for us, but most recently was the CFO for our Investment Services business. So he's been a partner to all of us, both in investment services, but in the growth of Alpha. So he brings a lot of expertise here. And we'll have more to talk about soon in terms of our final decision there.

Okay. Fair enough. Limited what you can say I totally get that. I love the transition to the asset management business, which was, as we touched on in the beginning, a pretty good bright spot, some pretty significant strength in [indiscernible]. I know you've made some key hires in that business and gain share in retail and you've launched some new products. So beyond launching the low-cost suite, how are you going to drive adoption in that retail channel?

Yes. So, we -- again, like anything else, you see the results, but the seeds for this were laid a couple of years in the past. We have been -- we've made this pivot not from, but to -- so we're not leaving behind our core institutional strength, but a recognition that so much of the ETF flows end up in retail portfolios, either directly or indirectly. And there's a couple of things about that. First of all, retail investors don't need nor value liquidity. So there's a lot of investors that love SPIE, they love the liquidity. They love the tight spreads and they're more than willing to pay that price. On the other hand, we needed to launch that low-cost site, which we launched several years ago. We continue to gain share there, and we're happy where we are on that. But secondly, it's -- which your question implies, it's not just about having the right products. It's how you think about who you're selling to, how you think about supporting it and how you're thinking about product development. So last year, SSG launched 90 new products. Some of them were subclasses of others. But the point being is that, this is a rapid -- the ETF has become the vehicle of choice. And not just in the U.S., I mean, we're seeing it now in Europe. We just crossed over $100 billion in ETFs in Europe. So are much of the same reason except for the tax reason. You're seeing this kind of adoption in Europe. Where is it happening? It's happening in the private banks for the same reason that it happened in the wire houses and the RIAs here. It's a way to actually enable the adviser to act as a portfolio manager with lots of tightness around them in terms of the product and all that. Secondly, digital platforms in Europe are rising rapidly and they're using ETFs is that a vehicle of choice. So that's one area of growth within SSG. But I should really point out a couple of others. One is just retirement. We are a retirement leader in both the U.S. and outside the U.S. So we have $800 billion in DC assets. There's been a heck of a lot of innovation in there. We were the first to have a target date fund that adopted the deferred annuities in it. So you now have a target date fund that provides some longevity protection and that's a growing area of interest and expertise. Lots of interest and lots of R&D on our side, not a product yet launched, but how do you incorporate privates into target date funds, because I've talked about this before. If you think about the retirement investor, they are true long-term buy-and-hold investors, and they should get the advantage of an illiquidity premium, because they're not touching their balances. So how do you do that? And how do you do that in a way that passes muster through the various fiduciary rules is something that we're focused on, but we think it's a real opportunity to provide, a better kind of offering for retirement investors. And then finally, cash. We continue to grow on the cash side. And there's still a lot of cash out there. We've continued to grow products in that. Some of the cash comes off of our own platforms elsewhere. But a lot of it is just sold out into third-party platforms, too. So it's been across the board kind of growth at SSGA, again, not forgetting the institutional business, that growth also in 2024. So again, we feel good about that, but we also feel like we're making -- we're positioning it for longer-term growth.

Got it. Do you have any sense -- I know it's hard sometimes to estimate this precisely, but do you have any sense about where you've been able to take your retail market share in the U.S. and ETFs? And do you have a goal?

Yes. So we do have a sense because, we -- you can actually track the market share in what we call the low-cost funds. And so we continue to gain share there. We're over in the low-cost funds. We passed over the 5% mark, which is what we wanted to do there. So we feel -- and we continue to gain share much faster than the market is growing -- we don't have a goal per se other than to continue to outgrow the market, because we've got room to grow.

Sure. Yes, at mid-single digits, you definitely have [indiscernible] especially given the brand. You touched on privates in Retirement, which has been an ongoing theme throughout capital markets. I know you've announced the tie-up with Apollo but I believe it was more on the ETF side. Are you -- is that going to be a broader relationship? Or are you engaging in more partners than just one?

So we do have a broad partnership with Apollo, and we're looking at a lot of things. The one area that's gotten all the publicity is still in a quiet period with the SEC, so I can't talk much about that, but we are looking in other areas, including retirement with them. But we also have -- and we're careful about -- we have a number of partnerships, but not an infinite number of partnerships. So we've got a long-term one with Blackstone in bank loans that we're quite proud of, and we continue to work there. And then we've announced a partnership with Bridgewater, again, taking some of their products and the goal would be to put them in an ETF format.

Okay. Now we're talking about ETFs. We got to talk about the big news we got last week, right? So Vanguard came out made some big changes, but it wasn't just ETFs. They did it on traditional mutual funds, too. So do you have -- do you see any impact from those announced cuts? And do you think either first order or second order, right? Because when they've done this in the past, it wasn't one and done. This is a big start. So it might be a little different this time. But what are your thoughts on the implications of that?

Yes. I mean I think Vanguard is [indiscernible] taking a look at the product offering and making sure they are where they need to be. We actually feel pretty good because if you look at the funds that they targeted and look at the pricing on ours, we're already at that point. So we don't see a need at this point to actually go any further. We feel like we're competitive. So in some ways, they're making adjustments and as large as it was, it was actually a fairly narrow set of funds of theirs, particularly on the ETF side. So we don't see a price war breaking out, we see an important adjustment that they felt they needed to make.

Yes. And yes, it's funny because I've pulled up the XLF. They're still above you, even with the cut. So they're more coming to you and...

But I think it's a recognition to that for us, for them, for the industry, the ETF really is the vehicle of choice, and that's actually important for us at State Street, because it touches everything we do. We're a large ETF sponsor. We're also the world's largest ETF administrator. So this all helps us. We also are now working with clients, and this is an initiative that cuts across our services business and our asset management business to help others get into the ETF business, right? This idea of the ETF in a box. So it's a U.S., but it's also importantly a non-U.S. phenomenon. And we think this is only -- it's being only beneficial to us.

Sure. That's fair. I'd love to transition to private markets. We touched on it a little bit there. You've got some goals. So it's 9% of your servicing revenue now. You want it to get to $1 billion in the next 4 or 5 years, which suggests about a 20% CAGR. So can you tell us how you built up that private business? And what's driving your optimism around this really heady growth?

So we built it up initially as an administration business, and it grew up really as the alternatives business grew up. So initially, it was around hedge, then around private equity and real estate and finally, most recently around credit. We participate in all of those areas. And what's happening, Brennan, it's following in many ways, but on an accelerated basis, what's going on in the long-only space. So you've seen product proliferation. You've seen big sponsors emerge multiproduct sponsors, but probably [indiscernible] affecting this business more than anything else is the democratization of it. You heard John Greg talks about this all the time, right. Ten years ago, average ticket $100 million today, average ticket $100,000. And it's institutions like yours, right, that are enabling this democratization that creates a lot of complexity for the sponsor. So that's driving a desire to outsource. It's still a heavily in-sourced business, which made sense if you're raising a fund every 2 or 3 years, you had under 100 participants in it, not very complex, a heck of a lot more complex now. So that's what's going on. And then secondly, as you start to think about some of these multi-strategy funds, some of these more complex credit funds. So the rise of BDCs, for example, right? BDCs are a great opportunity for us. We're the #1 servicer in it. And it's not just the serving element to it, but we will also -- we're very careful, as you know, about our balance sheet and about who we lend to. We try and lend, we try and do our lending in kind of cooperation coordination with our core services business. So we will selectively lend there. And so for all those reasons and the fact that there seems to be just near infinite demand for this as this democratization carries on. That and the complexity that's driving into these firms, we see lots of really interesting growth.

You spoke to how the progression of growth has sort of moved along with the private industry. Do you have any -- can you give us any sense about what the asset class breakdown of your private business looks like, like how -- are they all equally sized [indiscernible] asset management?

No. So the largest would be hedged; second, largest private equity; third real estate; and fourth credit. And probably the growth is...

Inverse.

Is the inverse, particularly in credit because you're -- one, just the proliferation of it and the number of new entrants. But this idea that increasingly, investors are thinking about the world, not in terms of private credit and public credit, but think about it in credit and want vehicles that reflect both from an administration perspective, that's complicated, and that's where we come in.

Yes, right. And it seems something what you're doing with Apollo. So the fee rate on private business is higher. So is it -- as you grow that business, is it going to be enough to potentially offset that 2% that we talked about before. And can you talk about the profitability? I'd assume that expenses are probably higher. It's probably greater complexity. So I don't know whether or not you look at it this way, but how is it like the unit economics or the margin compared in the [indiscernible]...

Yes. I mean we don't disclose margins at that level, but your assumptions are correct on both, revenues are higher, expenses are a little bit higher, but it is a profitable business, but it's also one that is we're creating our various platforms. We're seeing our unit costs go down and our cost to serve go down. And again, this is what's driving the demand for our services, because even the largest, most complex players who have lots of money out there and can do whatever they want. They're looking at their scale, they're looking at our scale, they're looking at our economics, our ability to configure on their behalf, and that's why we're seeing the business move towards us.

Got it. You mentioned this before and you also laid it out in your fourth quarter when you provided the outlook, operating model simplification, right, being a factor in your expense growth. So could you put a little meat on that bone. What are some of the details around that? And is it going to be ultimately a net efficiency generator?

So as you know, because you've been alongside us and all -- this, we have been focused on our expenses now for a long time. And as you'd imagine early on, it was a lot of low-hanging fruit or things that were just so core, that we needed to get out right away. What we've been focused on recently and as we look forward is exactly what you described is our operating model. And what that means is, I call it the platformization of everything that we do. And State Street has a long history of serving the most complicated players out there. We have not been afraid of complexity, and we've been willing to take on those kinds of things. But they only make sense to take on to the extent to which you can actually put a platform in place. So when we talk about operating model, we talk about taking all that complexity in these clients that we have all known and heard from. And putting the core of what we do on this platform and building in this configurability. So that in a nutshell, is when we talk about our operating model. That's what we're talking about here. And the advantage to that is we retain -- the clients retain the ability to have the kind of configuration that they come to us for. And we retain and deliver back to them the lower unit cost of a standard platform model. And that, that's what we're talking about there. So how are we going about it? One is continued injection of technology into this. And we all talk about AI, I talked to you about in the past that we've made real inroads if you think about the machine learning. We've talked a lot about fund accounting and the fact that we have fewer and fewer fund accountants in the fund accounting organization. Fund accounting is almost a continuous process now as opposed to an end of the day every time a transaction is made, the actual fund accounting is occurring through machine learning. Second example is around reconciliations. If you think about what an investment service there is, it's a series of reconciliations, again through machine learning, about 95% of the reconciliations that used to be done manually are now just happening. The future now is on the 5% because 5% doesn't sound like a lot, but in real numbers, it's actually an awful lot. And to where now we're using next-generation AI is around actual AI copilots reconciliation copilots working with these recon experts to very rapidly, say, with this 5%, what is the likely way to actually resolve this. Again, with the goal to take that 5% number now down to something that approaches zero in terms of what requires human interaction.

Okay. And you sort of touched on a couple of the points from my next question. But when we think about these AI-driven investments you've been making, what's the impact of the P&L? Has it been a [indiscernible] in net efficiency at or yet? Or is it still mostly on the investment side?

So on machine learning, it has absolutely been not just an efficiency add but because service quality has gone up and service quality is the most important indicator of both client retention and future sales from existing clients and new clients because these clients all talk to each other and they know it's going to -- so that we are seeing the return on. In terms of the kind of Gen AI and some of the things that I've talked about earlier. We're still early days on that. So that reconciliation, the 5% that I'm talking about, that will be in the future, but not in the future. Second area is we've got an internal. We've just launched a kind of ask chatbot that will be focused on all the internal things that people need to focus on. Why are we focused on the internal -- I mean you're always worried about client data leaking out for these large language models. But if it's an HR question and involve something inside, so that you'll start to see the benefits of. And then finally, we [indiscernible] the next generation of this around [indiscernible] we call client service. And client service, a typical kind of thing would be a portfolio manager shows up 7:00 a.m., turns on his or her machine, cash isn't where they thought it would be. [indiscernible] be a phone call typically the CRD on that, and there'll be a scurry of people. That's all going to be [indiscernible] chatbot that 99% of the time there's -- these are patterns that have been seen before and lends itself to these kinds of Gen AI solutions. This is all very, very soon in the future in terms of us seeing the returns on that. So machine learning, we're getting those returns. We have Gen AI poised for near-term returns.

Got it. That's helpful. I will give out a few more minutes on to see if there's any questions in the audience. had a rather low batting average with the questions from the audience, but we'll give it a shot. Okay, back to me. So last one, what I'd like to touch on is capital. So we did get the CCAR scenarios just recently. So I don't know if you have any preliminary thoughts on that. And I'd love to hear how M&A fits in with your capital priorities. And then you're going with an 80% payout ratio, but I think it involves some balance sheet growth here. You've got some lending that you want to do. So it's probably some capital consumption there. Is that the right way to think about it more longer term? Or is it more likely to get back to that 100% where you used to see it?

Yes. So firstly, on CCAR, the scenarios more or less as expected, nothing out of the unusual for us. So we don't expect to see anything unusual in terms of the results. In terms of capital, we've talked about 80% return. And the way we think about that is that's just not a number that's pulled out of the air because we do think about some of the things that you described in terms of how do we deploy the balance sheet in a shareholder accretive kind of way. And that's -- it's that trade-off between do I provide more return and do I return the capital. And the 80% number seems about right for us. It enables us to continue to thoughtfully grow RWA, enables us to continue to do lending that we've shown can actually drive fee revenue growth. In terms of M&A, we've been very clear on this, which is M&A is not a strategy. We will do M&A if it helps us propel our strategy again in a way that would be better than what the organic solution would be. The way that's manifested it's hold for us, as you know, is fair steady stream of little things, right? Sometimes it's just investment in a technology that that's outsourced trading was this was a way to propel the build-out of our outsourced trading business and it was a pretty almost instantaneously accretive kind of deal and enabled us to get the kind of capabilities that we didn't have. Sometimes it's minority investments in new technologies either we want to watch it or we want to own it. We've gotten better and more sophisticated about when we do these things that we typically then are providing volume to those institutions, but we also put in place whether it's warrants or those kinds of things, such that if their growth is the product of all of us, we get the benefits of that, too. So we'll continue to do those kinds of things. And again, we'll always look but it's a pretty high bar for us because we like where we are, and we like the kinds of capabilities that we have in place.

That's great. It's a good note to end on. Thanks a lot, Ron.

Thank you, Brennan, and thank you all.

Thank you.