The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Well, good morning, everyone. It is -- we're going to get started with our next session here. It is my pleasure to welcome Dermot McDonogh, CFO of BNY. Over the course of 2025, BNY continue to see solid momentum across the business, underscored by accelerating organic growth, delivering better-than-expected NII, driving positive operating leverage, and of course, return lots of capital to shareholders. So all good news, starting to be reflected in the stock to say the least, another really solid year for you guys in terms of shareholders rewarding this nice performance. Stock is up over 40-plus percent year-to-date. So all down there and looking forward to hopefully replicate something close to that next year, we'll see. But looking forward to our chat as always. So thank you, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me back, Alex.

So why don't we start there? I would love to get your perspective on, first, just 2026 priorities. As I mentioned, really strong momentum really across the franchise in '25. What are some of the key areas of focus leading into next year for you guys?

So look, it's review season where we all get our performance review. So it's a good time to review the performance of the company. I would say from where I sit, the firm is performing really well at the moment. There's real strong momentum in the institution. If you reflect back on the last 3 years under Robin's tenure, we laid out strategic pillars. We laid out principles. I think we've earned credibility with the market in terms of telling everybody what we're going to do and then doing it. So I think we've earned some credibility points on our execution shops over the last 3 years. And in terms of medium-term goals, medium-term guidance, how we've guided over the medium term, how we've guided in a year, I think we've executed pretty well against those guidelines. And as you said, our investors are pleased with that and have recognized it. So as we finish the year, we finished the year with very strong momentum. We're running -- we're selling hard into the tape in a way that we can start 2026 with strong momentum. I think financials are having a nice run at the moment more broadly, the market is quite bullish, and we're kind of leaning in heavily to that, and we feel like the sentiment with our clients and the activity that we see is quite positive. And so if you kind of go down a layer below that, there are two things that have been really driving the firm over the last couple of years. One is the acceleration of our commercial model. We've talked about this a lot in the past under the leadership of Cathinka Wahlstrom. We've really kind of changed the way how we show up for clients. We had CMX 2 this year in the summer, where we'll bring together all the salespeople from around the world and really articulate the vision and the strategy of how we want to deliver ONE BNY for our clients and so that's kind of the operalization of ONE BNY, which is showing up in the numbers. And as we've said many times, doing more with our existing client base is our biggest opportunity. So the commercial side of the house and how we show up for clients and sales and the retention of talent, the acquisition of new talent, I think, is going really, really well.

Yes, go ahead, sorry.

And then the next one is the platform operating model, which we're just in the throes of Wave 5 at the moment. So 75% of the firm is in the model. 25% of the firm has been in the model for a year. So we kind of -- the difference between Wave 4 and Wave 5 and Wave 1 is very, very different because of the maturity curve of how people show up in the model. So Wave one is really -- we're really beginning to see the benefits both in terms of growth, productivity, cultural transformation, et cetera, et cetera. And so when you add all those things together, in order to drive growth, which is what we're now really trying to do, you need transformation. And the last 3 years of really kind of getting back to being a well-run company, which is pillar #2, and we feel that really positions us well going into 2026.

Great. Well, let's unpack some of this, starting maybe with your first point, really around creating this kind of ONE BNY commercial model, which is showing up ultimately in better top line growth. You guys started to break out and really kind of highlight organic revenue growth. I think it was running at around 4-ish percent in the first half of the year. Talk to us a little bit about aspirations there. I know you don't have an official target for sort of fee growth. But if you think about areas where some of these initiatives could become most needle moving and where you hope to kind of get that number to over time, that will be helpful.

So the first point I'd make is for BNY -- the business model of BNY is very diversified. We have lots of different businesses doing lots of different things. You add it together, we kind of feel it's a well-diversified business model. And this year has been a really good year. You have some businesses that are really running on all cylinders. Some areas that are investing for growth in the future. Some businesses are in a period of early stages of transformation. I'm sure you're going to ask me a question on IWM. So that will be one of those businesses. But when you take the aggregate of each business and bring it together, then you see the firm really in the total performing quite well. So I think if you kind of look at IWM specifically, when that really comes back in the way we expect it to come back and then the investments that Jose is making, I think that's going to fuel the growth opportunity in that space, which will then feed the growth opportunity of the firm. So I think you mentioned 4%. Some are higher, some are lower. So overall, we kind of feel like with the transformation of the last couple of years, that growth algorithm, we feel we can lean into. And also the other point that I would make -- I would make 2 further points on that one is, one is innovation around product. Earlier this year, we hired Carolyn Weinberg, who is really well known in this space in terms of product innovation, particularly in the digital asset space. And so we expect in the same way that we have the commercialization and the kind of the whole transformation of the sales side of the house, we expect to see the same kind of forward trajectory on the product side of the house. So I'm very, very excited about that. And then when you put all that mix together and you layer on the opportunity for BNY with AI over the coming years, you kind of feel quite confident about our ability to generate good, meaningful organic growth.

Yes. We'll dig into some of the individual areas of organic growth in a second. But I did want to ask you about inorganic. You guys have not been particularly active, but there is no shortage of headlines this year surrounding some of the M&A speculation out there. Talk to us a little bit about where M&A ranks in your priority list as you look out and the growth of the business over the next few years, including maybe some of the larger scale deals.

So there's a lot happening in the space at the moment, particularly in your shop. So you've done 2 deals this year. So congratulations. And so a lot of rumors about us earlier on in the year, but we don't need inorganic growth to execute our ambitions. I remember when the rumors were around, some people were writing, "oh, has the transformation run its course and does BNY need inorganic to fuel growth from here?" And I would say the answer is most emphatically not. We kind of really feel we have a great strategy. We've taken a very long-term view of it. We're patient with it. And so we have more than enough to do in-house to drive growth from where we see today. But inorganic is that we did a small acquisition around this time last year, closed Archer. That's gone really, really well for us. if I'm honest, it has outperformed our expectations albeit the numbers are quite small in the context of overall BNY, but I think it has demonstrated to us internally that we have the execution skill set to be able to do inorganic if we need to do it. So we evaluate a lot of opportunities. We screen as a consequence of the rumors, we've become very busy with bankers coming to us with ideas.

Showing up in the [ screens ] again.

Yes. And so it's exciting. So we screen a lot, but culturally, the bar is very high. It has to be attractive financially, and it has to fit within the overall strategy that we're trying to deliver for clients and shareholders.

Got it. Okay. Let's pivot back and talk about some of the organic growth opportunities you see in the business. Starting really with the Asset Servicing and kind of the "traditional" kind of the trust business. And acknowledging that you guys are obviously a lot more than that and you and I have talked plenty about that and I think the market gets that as well. But when I look at the servicing business for you guys, it's still the largest fee pool out of all the individual businesses and it's been growing really nicely. I think you guys are on track to deliver the fastest growth there, and so they're almost the last 10 years. And while some of that is probably helped by some of the macro factors, right, like volatility in fixed income markets, has been probably pretty helpful. But talk to us a little bit more about where are you seeing the incremental share gains? How sustainable do you think the level of fee growth is in that business? And what are the opportunities to take market share even higher there?

So I have to start with leadership and culture for that particular question. We were chatting here before we came on stage, the Goldman conference of 3 years ago was Emily Portney's last conference as CFO, and she's gone on to run that business and really has done a first-class job getting back to basics, investing in core infrastructure, listening to clients, delivering what clients want, simplifying what we deliver for clients. So we're trying to -- with the platform operating model, we're trying to move away from bespoke solutions and more product innovation at scale that can give clients what they want in a way that we can scale for everybody. And so I think that's been quite an important change in how we think about that business. We've delivered the medium-term goal we outlined at this conference 4 years ago in terms of margin. And so I think we're executing really, really well in the business. I know it's a question that gets asked a lot about pricing pressure. It's not something that we've seen in a material way over the last 18 months. It's a competitive place. But by improving the margin, we've been able to reduce our cost to serve. So that has allowed us to be more competitive in pricing. And I think we're just showing up in a much more differentiated way in terms of client service, and we deliver the whole firm to Asset Servicing clients, not just what it is for Asset Servicing. And so a lot of our Asset Servicing clients are looking to our other distribution platforms and the interplay between the Pershing and Asset Servicing is becoming increasingly more important. And so kind of stitching the firm together for those clients has become an important feature of that business. So I feel very good about the leadership. I feel very good about the growth trajectory. I think we've won a good bit more than our share this year. And as I always say, we don't win market share from our competitors. We earn the trust of clients and so it's clients that give us the business, not the competitors. And so I think we're a client-first firm, and that's really showing up in a positive way in the Asset Servicing space and look, we've done really well with the private markets. We've really done well in the ETF space. Our core custody is a great offering. And so we feel like there's a lot of opportunities to invest. And the partnership between Emily and Carolyn Weinberg and the whole digital asset space is a place that, as a firm, we're very excited about.

Yes. Well, let's talk about the Digital Asset part of the business for a couple of minutes here. BNY is kind of positioning itself to be sort of the bridge, I guess, between the traditional finance sort of the rapidly evolving digital ecosystems, the way you guys sort of described it. Obviously, you were early in the crypto-custody offering, and there are other things on the come, you guys are obviously doing the tokenized money market fund with Goldman. You rolled out Drive a Stablecoin Reserve Fund. So there's plenty to do there. But when you zoom out, what do you think the kind of tokenized asset ecosystem looks like, kind of 2 to 3 years from now, so not going 10 years out, but also not asking you to call the next quarter. And what will do you guys see yourself playing in that? And maybe ask a third question related to that. Commercial model around it. When does it actually start to move the needle in a more material way to the P&L?

So if I answer that, there are 2 ways to answer the question. One is through the narrow lens of a CFO. Are we making money or two is like a Digital Asset as a broader part of the total leadership of BNY and so I'll mix it up a bit because there are a couple of answers to the question. One is, as you said, we've been in the space for a while. We're doing Digital Asset custody now. We're the first to do on chain NAVs. I think we have a lot of technological expertise in distributed leisure technology. And I think clients want us and expect us and demand is to have thought leadership in this space as they evaluate their business models on the forward. And the way I kind of think about it like BNY has been at the heart of the financial market infrastructure for the last 241 years. And now with Digital Assets and DLT and AI, I think we're about to write the chapters of the next decades. And so it's very critical for us to be at the forefront of the IQ intellectual thinking, thought leadership, product innovation and development on that space. And so as a consequence of that, we spend a lot of time with clients listening to their needs about how we can take some products and develop them like 24/7 trading would be one to pick a case in point. And if you're a part of the BNY network, over time, you're just going to be able to move your assets around the network in a lot more seamless way. And so we see a lot of opportunity to serve clients' needs a little bit more seamlessly in the future through this technology. From a revenue standpoint, right now, is it material to the firm? Not really. In the future, do I see it being material, a growing importance? Absolutely. And what the thought leadership is doing is bringing Digital Asset native to the firm to learn about how we do things. And as a consequence, we're doing a lot more traditional business with digital natives as we explore the product innovation about how we can do their products with them on the forward and then export that product ideation to more traditional clients. So in the space that we're investing in, we're committed to it, and we think it will feed the bottom line in the medium term.

Do you see that also driving some of the more traditional business another way, saying if you look at some of the larger asset managers and how they're planning to evolve their business models and perhaps tokenize some of their assets in terms of what they're offering to their clients, having those capabilities will be critical therefore, there's only a few places that can go to and kind of...

So I would agree with that. Also, I think there are opportunities and there are also disruptions. And so you have to be in it and be willing to self-disrupt yourself. So we're constantly sitting in room saying, okay, what does this mean for our business model? How can we disrupt, how can we innovate? How can we change. And then as a consequence of that, how do we serve clients and help clients change too so that they don't get disruptors.

Yes. Just maybe as a quick follow-up to that. One of the benefits of digital ecosystem is perhaps more efficiency, therefore, less kind of frictional cash, less collateral in the system, perhaps et cetera. You guys are at the end of the day, sort of big depository institutions. So you like deposits, you need deposits. So if the outcome of all of this is less sort of frictional cash, how do you think about that as a risk?

So I would say in the medium term, don't see us. We talk about it, we evaluate it. But for now, I don't see that as a headwind that we're overly concerned about.

Okay. Helpful. Okay. Let's talk about Pershing. You mentioned that in some of your earlier remarks as well. It's another large business for the firm. It's been facing several structural tailwinds, obviously, for quite some time, and that's been helpful. Recent growth has been a little slower for some of the attrition related issues. There's some consolidation space. Are we largely through that? How are you thinking about that business into '26?

So the last couple of years with -- there's been M&A. There has been the one large de-conversion that's, unfortunately, I had to talk about for several quarters. That's largely behind us. As best we can tell, there are no -- there is nothing kind of deconversion, we don't see anything in the -- all that stuff is largely behind us, I would say. So in terms of mid-single-digit growth in the near to medium term is something that we've talked about a lot and so we continue to believe in that. It's a business that we invest quite heavily in from a technological standpoint. We believe in the Wove product. We're investing in the Wove products. We're winning some nice mandates. We've retained some nice business on the back of Wove. Now people are -- as Wove is becoming a little bit more mature. It's been out in the market for a couple of years. Our clients that are on the traditional platform are kind of now looking at Wove. And so in many ways, the challenge for Wove is how to onboard clients that want to come on to the platform quickly enough. So in some ways, we are a little bit of a victim of our own success in terms of people's appetite to want to be part of Wove. The other thing I would say is Jose and the IWM and Emily on the Asset Servicing, how those 3 different businesses talk to each other and use the storefront of Pershing as a distribution platform, I think, is something that historically wasn't really thought about and Pershing -- when Robin talks about the de-siloing of the firm, Pershing really was a siloed business. And so over the last 3 years, Pershing has become much, much closer to the firm and so that we can provide the full banking capabilities that we have to the Pershing client base, which before and now we haven't really been that good at doing. And also, there are things like products that our Treasury Services business provide clients that we could also provide to Pershing clients. And so there are things that we do for our clients that we don't do ourselves internally, which is quite interesting. So that all kind of comes back to de-siloing the firm, doing it once, doing it well and doing it for everybody. And we're kind of excited about what that means on the forward as well.

Yes. So more than ONE BNY. You mentioned Investment and Wealth Management business a number of times. So it's probably worthwhile spending a couple of minutes on this. So out of all the businesses that you have, that's the one, obviously, that's faced some organic growth challenges and probably more so on the investment management side as opposed to the wealth side. When I think about some of the structural headwinds for a lot of the traditional asset managers, which is most of that business for you guys. They've been around for a while and it's not easy to fix. So when you think about opportunities to improve organic growth in that business, what does that look like what's kind of within your control that can turn that around?

So I place a lot on -- I hope he's not listening in, but Jose has been a terrific hire for the firm. And he has -- we're patient. So if you kind of break the businesses into 2 private world, we're a top 10, we like the business. If you saw our client list, you'd say, that's interesting. And we believe there's a lot more we can do, and we have made an important hire in that space in the last few weeks, which was announced. And he will start early in the new year. So I think we have a good strategy there. $2.1 trillion asset manager. We feel like we have a right to play there. We feel we have good manufacturing capability. We've got insight, which is market leading. We have drivers which is market-leading. We have Walter Scott, which is market-leading. So we kind of like that. But Jose has done a lot over the last year to bring those discrete businesses closer together to each other and closer to the firm and we've managed to take efficiency out as it generate efficiency so we can invest in strategic hires. We've just hired a new Head of Global Distribution, starts in the new year. And so I think the short answer to the question is, do we feel confident that we can return that business or the segment to mid-20s in the medium term, I think, yes, and do we have a path to do that? I think the answer is yes. And then it comes down to execution and delivery, which I think in terms of what we've done for the rest of the firm, we've shown that we have the ability to execute on what we say we're going to do.

Great. All right. Let's pivot to expenses and margins for the firm as a whole. That's been another really great part of the story. As you're well aware, from the last couple of years. I think you guys are on track to deliver a 35% plus pretax margins this year, already well ahead of the kind of the 33-plus target that you've set out, frankly, not that long ago. Recognizing that incremental margin expansion is going to be a function of both revenue growth and expense discipline, right. Those 2 things obviously kind of have to go hand in hand. Talk to us a little bit how you frame maybe the multiyear expense trajectory for the business? And where do you think the margins could ultimately settle out to be in a steady state?

So if you go -- so the North Star for us as a team is positive operating leverage. And we consistently say that over the cycle, we want to grow positive operating leverage. And so '23, '24, '25, we've executed as well on that. And so we, as a team, fundamentally believe that through the cycle, under a wide range of scenarios we can continue to deliver that. Over the last couple of years, we've roughly harvested $0.5 billion of efficiencies per year and invested, so we're investing. I get a lot of questions from investors, are you investing enough? Don't starve the business, invest to grow because everybody -- okay, Dermot, you're done with the expenses. '22, we had 8% growth rate in expenses; '23, 2.7%; '24, flat; this year, we're kind of -- we guide us in the middle of the year up to around 3%. So as somebody said on the TV this morning, there are good expenses and bad expenses. So we're obsessed about the good expenses, and so we want to invest to grow. And I think the platform operating model really helps with that. And so our annual planning and budgeting has become a lot more dynamic and we recalibrate constantly depending on the opportunity that we see to -- and we've made a lot of incremental decisions this year around deploying expense into businesses where we see opportunity for growth. And so that allows us to grow the operating leverage. So I'm still obsessed about expenses, but I'm obsessed in a positive way on kind of spending good expenses because I think we can continue to extract efficiency, but we do want to deploy more back into the business so we can fuel growth.

Got it. Okay. So more to go, I guess, on that front is the short answer.

Yes. But like the message I would leave everybody is we're very disciplined. We are molecular. We're constantly looking to improve you've seen over the course of this year, head count is on the downward trajectory. We're at pre-COVID levels for overall headcount. We've grown revenue. And so we're doing more with less and the productivity of the firm has increased.

Great. Okay. So maybe at this point, we'll pivot a bit and talk about some of the financial dynamics as we kind of get closer to quarter end here. Maybe first, give us a bit of an update for Q4. Your guidance previously implied that Q4 NII was going to be, I think, flattish versus to Q3. You also gave a little bit of color on expenses and fees. So anything else you're willing to share as far as Q4, that would be helpful.

So as it relates to net interest income, I think you said that we guided flat. I think we're -- quarter-on-quarter, we kind of expect to be up mid-single digits at this space. Deposits have performed well. We're -- as we've said on the last call, we're spending a lot of time thinking about '26 cutting the tails of the risk distribution, and so very focused on our ability to grow NII from here. And I think in terms of our risk management philosophy and our culture of the teamwork and the collaboration and the transparency between the GLS business, the Treasurer and the CIO is something that makes me feel very proud. We've really grown our risk management shops and really pleased with where all that stands. So on NII, I would say mid-single digits quarter-on-quarter.

Good news. Fees and expenses, anything on that front?

So expenses, I think, quarter-on-quarter, call it, 3.5%. Overall, revenue for year-on-year, I would say, mid-single digits. And look, as it's this time of year, just to kind of complete the picture, we usually book a severance number in Q4, and I would expect that to be around $100 million this quarter.

Is that in the 3.5% quarter-over-quarter increase in expenses? Or is that pulled out of that?

That's pulled out, yes.

That's pulled out. So that's on top of -- got it.

So 3.5% is more on the operating side, severance comes through [ a report ].

And just another follow-up. When you talk about mid-single-digit growth in total revenues, you talked about Q4 of this year versus Q4 of last year.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Got you. Great. When you mentioned NII up sequentially mid-single digits. Obviously, good news there. It sounds like deposits are the driver. Can you just help delineate how much of that is some of the seasonality would tend to typically see in the business in the fourth quarter versus more of the kind of regular way organic growth and some of the benefits of the initiatives you put into place, where those deposits might actually end up being somewhat sticky.

So when the firm is -- so we don't need with deposits, it's part of the overall equation of the firm and the fabric and the client mix and so when the firm is performing well, which is doing at the moment, and there's a lot of trying to activity, which there is, deposits follow. And so every business is contributing to it, 2/3 of our deposits are operational. So therefore, we consider them sticky. If you kind of go back and reflect on Q3, over the last 2 years, what we expected in Q3 didn't happen in terms of the seasonal decline for different reasons. And so we're becoming better at our ability to manage it, forecasters that gives the asset side more ability to invest in a more disciplined way. And so we kind of feel where we are now, although look, we're waiting for the news from the Fed, who knows what the tone will that be like if it's an easing policy or a restrictive policy, that will kind of change the direction of how we think about the overall level of deposits, but from where we sit today in terms of our outlook for 2026, we feel pretty good about our ability to grow from here. And I would take Q4 as a good jumping off point for how we think about '26.

Great. Super helpful. Maybe in the last minute or so, I touch on capital returns as well. That's been a really important part of the growth algorithm for the business. As you look further out, obviously, the capital ratios remain quite healthy. Should we be thinking about a similar pace of sort of about 100% payout for the firm into '26 as well? Or are there other uses of capital that you see on the forward?

So capital-light business model, as one of your peers said, I can't remember exactly which quarter it was this year. I didn't think bank capital returns could be this high. I think we generated 28% ROTCE for that particular quarter. So we feel very good about where we are in terms of ROTCE and recognizing it's a capital-light business model and where we don't see really kind of good ways to invest in the business, we'll return it to our shareholders. That's been our case for the last couple of years and like no reason to change that in the medium term. And so I think we guided this year at or around 100%. And then the year through the year, we kind of went 90% to 100%. So we're kind of in that 95% to 100% buyback for the year. And so I would expect that kind of model to continue.

Great. All right. More of the same. We like that. Appreciate your time. Always great to see you. Thank you for spending time with us today.

Thanks, Alex. Take care.