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

Next up, we have Robin Vince, President and CEO of BNY Mellon. I told you I wouldn't mess it up. So here you go. But before we sort of get into the Q&A, I do want to talk about just in terms of when we look at BNY Mellon, and I think Robin joined the bank in 2020, became CEO about 15 months ago, October of 2022.

That's right.

It's been, in our view, when we're talking to investors, I think there is a bit of an under-the-radar turnaround that's going on at BNY Mellon. And I think Robin and Dermot, the CFO, and the rest of the team is leading the charge on it. So personally, when we speak to investors, I think there's a lot of excitement around just the narrative shift relative to the last decade. So I'm looking forward to just our discussion and the road ahead for BK.

But maybe just to start with looking back a little bit in terms of 2023 we're in a mini banking crisis last March. Just give us a sense in terms of, in your seat, what are the big takeaways or learnings from what happened in '23, be it in terms of liquidity, the regulatory backdrop, et cetera, as you think about managing the bank going forward?

Sure. Well, first of all, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having us here, and thanks to everybody who's been investing in the stock on the back of some of the changes that we've been trying to make. As Ebrahim pointed out, it really has been an interesting journey so far. I joined the firm, as you pointed out, and took over on September 1, 2022. And there are a whole variety of different things that we've learned as a collective team because it really is a team effort over the course of the past 15 months or so. Number one is that -- and you mentioned this when you're talking about the spring of last year, resilience really matters. And we have a long and storied history as a company of being a resilient firm and being prepared for the unexpected. And 2023 certainly turned out differently, I think, for most people in terms of the geopolitics, in terms of the economic environment, in terms of the stock market, in terms of rates, you name it. Most things were a little different than you would have probably seen if you took a poll in January of 2023. And that reminds us, first and foremost, that being prepared matters. And we talk internally at the company about this a lot, which is that resilience is a commercial attribute. And that's -- whether that's balance sheet resilience, which you obviously saw from us last year, not surprising, but nonetheless important, or whether it's operational resilience, in terms of the various different things that go on in the world every day. So, that's sort of number one. Number two, as we think about the year, we were very determined to make a difference and to begin the storytelling of what could be for the future. And so, 2023 was about figuring out what it was that held the company back. You mentioned over the past decade, Ebrahim, and I think that's right. In fact, it's probably fair -- I've talked about the past decade, but it's probably fair, it's past 15 years really since the merger between Bank of New York and Mellon that we haven't really lived up to our potential. And so, we went back, and we tried to study that. So, we did front-to-back reviews, strategy reviews on what we do, how we do it, who does it. And we took lessons away from all that, because we were very focused on saying, we can't just wish it to be different, we have to work it to be different. And so, part of that is reflecting and then figuring out what's different. And then the other, final part of 2023 was saying, okay, it's all very well to do the learning, important, but we need to show some early proof points, because we really felt appropriate pressure to show that something had changed in the company.And as we worked the problem, we, I think, in 2023, were able to show, hey, you know what, there's a little bit of promise in this franchise that maybe people had underappreciated before. And we wanted to expose that. So that's what '23 was about.

And I guess maybe as we look forward and we'll get into some of the ins and outs in the near term, but as you think about the strategic priorities, I think we've talked about de-siloing the bank, and that's going to create some productivity runway. But could you just give us what are the 3 top things that we should be scoring you on as we look from the outside, whether or not you're making progress or not?

Sure. So, from a strategy point of view, de-siloing is a very important one. Happy to talk more about that. It doesn't sound very glamorous, de-siloing. So, we reflected back instead and say, "okay, let's understand what's really exciting to our people and what is not the superficial issue, de-siloing being important, but what underlying are we really trying to get at?" And we came out with 3 strategic priorities, which we view as medium-term strategic priorities. We came out with them in 2023, but they'll last a little while. The first one is: be more for our clients. And the words are carefully chosen. It isn't, well, we don't have a very good client franchise because we have an amazing client franchise. The problem is we haven't fully leveraged our client franchise. So being more for our clients means, yes, there are some new clients in the world to discover. We've got to go find them, and there are places where we've got to lean into that, particularly internationally, also in some parts of the U.S. as well. Then we've got to be able to innovate and create new things for our clients because our clients want solutions, not just individual products. And what they need and how they need it evolves. So, we've become more solutions-oriented, and we've created new things like Wove, which was one of our business creations in Pershing, which is off to a very good start. And then the third thing is actually the most important, which is the blocking and tackling where clients say, you know what, I do one thing with you. But now that you've explained the company to me, I should probably be looking at these other adjacent things. And so if I'm doing collateral management, why aren't I doing margin services, or why aren't I doing securities lending, or why aren't I doing cash management, or why aren't I doing foreign exchange, or why aren't I doing payments? Because those things are next to each other, but I just described things that span 3 of our businesses. So that was number one. Number two was: run our company better. And one of my fellow G-SIB CEOs said to me, you know what, you have an amazing franchise, but in all honesty and candor, it's been undermanaged. And that's probably fair. So, running the company better has been an important pillar of how we want to try to make the change. And then third, but not least, and I've said this a few times in various different ways, channeling a little bit of Peter Drucker associated with how do you think about strategy but versus how do you think about execution and culture. And culture is critically important for us, because you've got to want people to see the issue and then to actually want to rally around the mission, because otherwise, it's a small group of people trying to do heroic things by themselves. So, powering our culture, which is the third of our 3 strategic pillars: that's equally important. We've been investing in a whole bunch of different things to enable that. So it's those 3 things. You asked about proof points, but proof points are going to be: show us the progress that you make under each heading. And so, I'd reflect back to last year and say, okay, well, actually, we generated some positive operating leverage, and we gave 3 different objectives or outlooks for the year around NIR, around returning capital, and around expenses. And they cut across, to some extent, all 3 of those pillars, and I'd view those as proof points. And we've given you medium-term outlooks in order to be able to continue to be able to hold us to account, which I think is exactly right -- starting with 2024 outlook, but also medium-term targets.

And again, maybe this is a wrong question to ask. But when we think about de-siloing, is this a 3-year process? Is it 5? When do you get to, this is what we like as a way forward?

It's a very fair question. And I think there's a bit of a short-, medium- and long-term answer to it, as there are with many things that we're doing, because we don't want to have grand plans with balloon payments in 5 years. Tt sort of hockey stick method to managing the company just wasn't what we felt was appropriate for our firm. Having said that, to see the full benefit of some of the things that I've been talking about, including de-siloing, I think it is a medium-term objective. We gave medium-term guidance at the beginning of the year, and we frame that as sort of 3 to 5 years. I think if you want to think about our progress on de-siloing, you could think about it along the same timeline. But there was progress in '23. There will be progress in '24. We've done things, I'll give you an example, on de-siloing. We had 2 different international and institutional clearing businesses, one that was in our Clearance and Collateral Management business and one that was in our Pershing business. And, as a result of being siloed, they've been encouraged to each have their own business. But clients, when they were looking at us, and they were saying, hi, I'm an institution, and I'd like some clearing services, please, they didn't know which business to go to because, essentially, they competed with each other, and they had very, very similar products. And so, we said, that doesn't make any sense. So, let's actually bring those 2 things together. And let's have one great business at BNY Mellon that does that. We're already seeing some benefit from it. But that was an example of something we did in '23. It will have some benefit in '24. It will have more benefit in '25. And I could give you so many different examples about those things that we've just been -- that we identified in our strategic reviews. We have an ongoing process that we call our Strategic Business Review, which is a continual process of saying, where do we have something that's illogical in the way that it's organized in the company that's a vestige from our past and how are we going to organize it differently going forward? We make the decision, we make the changes and we get on with it.

Got it. And I guess I'm going to go off script here. But when you think about the 2 components that have been hurdles to the silos and de-siloing it, to me, it sounds like there's a technology component and there's a personnel, in terms of just how your people go about this. Which one's tougher? And do you think it requires a different kind of talent or different kind of technology to get there?

So, I think they come in a little bit of a sequence, which is it really is personnel and organizational structure, which are reinforcing to each other, first and foremost. Technology is sort of a consequence, which is if you have people organized in a slightly siloed way, incentivized or with a mindset in a slightly siloed way, they then go on their own journeys when it comes to technology. And over time, if you let that fester for long enough, you end up with duplicates of various things. I've given the quip before around the fact that we have 8 different call centers in the company. It's the perfect example. If we were never siloed, you'd have had one group of people coming together saying, hey, we need a call center solution, a platform for the company. That would have been commissioned once and it would have been used 8 times. But in a siloed environment, you build 8 of them. So, it is people and org structure first, which is why we've gone after this cultural point and incentivizing from the very top through down the leadership levels. We're going to de-emphasize all of those organizational benefits of being siloed because there can be some. And instead, we're going to incentivize coming together as a company. That then, org structure plus the right people in the seats, we've made some changes to create the right people in the right seats, then allows us to get after the other issues. Now we've got to beat our way through all of the different duplications that have resulted. The bad news is that's work. The good news is there will be benefit from that work. It can be benefit on the top line. It can be benefit on the bottom line as well. And that's why we've embraced 2 concepts as part of de-siloing. One is a new commercial model, a new Chief Commercial Officer organizing the sales teams differently, organizing our sales practices differently. And then the second one is a platforms operating model, which is really going after this, let's run it once and run it really well for the benefit of the company, and that's how we'll get after the duplication. And we're just starting that evolution, and that will take some time, which is why I think the 3- to 5-year journey is right. Some of it has more front-loaded benefit, but some of it should ultimately beat through some of that legacy, it will take us a little more time. The benefit, I think, is that we'll see various different sort of progress over time. It's not a big bang delivery at the beginning or at the end.

I guess maybe switching gears. I don't think it's missed on many people that BK was one of the few companies where you were able to deliver on your NII guidance last year. What you said in Jan ended up being correct on December 31. As you look at the outlook, I think it's about negative 10% year-over-year. One, do you feel like you have the same level of visibility that you had a year ago around NII? And remind us, what the assumptions are underlying that.

So, the fun thing about giving outlook or guidance is, at the beginning of the year, you have an equal amount of confidence when you give it as you do the following year. Now it all looks very clever with benefit of hindsight, oh, they must have known some secret thing. Of course, you don't really know the answer at the beginning of the year, and there were plenty of twists and turns in 2023. I'm sure there will be twists and turns in '24. On the rate side, we've already seen some in terms of 150 basis points of easing assumed at the beginning of the year. Now it's probably about half that. March was a pretty common narrative for the first cut the beginning of the year. Now it's pushed back probably to more like June or thereabouts. And so, we'll see those twists and turns. We're not changing any of our outlook or guidance. We feel pretty similarly about it as now 6 weeks into the year as we did when we first came up with that, which was the beginning of the year. But yes, there'll be ups and downs. There will be twists and turns. The thing that made a difference wasn't that we had a perfect crystal ball at the beginning. We don't. It's that we were prepared and that our team was able to hustle. We took advantage of the natural things that we have, which are a competitive differentiator on rates. And so, it's not by accident we generated it. It was through work, but it was through work relevant to our franchise. Some of our close competitors have a couple at best of different deposit-based businesses. We not only have those, we have Wealth Management, sure, we have Asset Servicing, which is the largest in terms of deposit gathering, but the majority of our deposits, more than 50%, come from outside of Asset Servicing: Corporate Trust and Treasury Services and Clearance and Collateral Management businesses. Those are all businesses that are unique to us or businesses which are certainly not in the trust bank peer set. So, we were able to look across and really leverage the breadth of our universe, plus, our Collateral Management business, not only for the deposits it generates, but for the fact that it's in an adjacent part of the interest rate sector. At the end of the day, if you've got clients who want to put deposits versus wanting to do repo versus wanting to do money market funds, guess what? We have a large money market fund. Guess what? We're the world's largest collateral manager, so, we see a ton of activity in repo and we have a deposit business. That's the $1.4 trillion worth of cash in the ecosystem that's directly surrounding the space. And that doesn't -- I mean that's not even the total of repo, which is closer to $6 trillion. So, we have these different oars in the overall money markets river, if you want to call it that, and that's allowed us to be able to be much more dynamic. That plus the diversification inherent in the franchise, that's how we felt we delivered 2023.

And just very simplistically, again, depending on who you speak to, there are some -- a cohort of investors that expects rates maybe go up again. The Fed might have to hike. In our seat, what's the best outcome for BK when you think about just the rate backdrop? Is it rate cuts? Is it no rate cuts? Just how should we think about it?

We tried to position ourselves not with a particular singular scenario that we're rooting for, because that's managing the business in a way that you're pinning your hopes on things that you don't control. So, we're focused on things that we can control. And we've tried to position ourselves so that plus or minus a certain amount, we're relatively less dependent on exactly what happens next. And so, you can decide that you want to run the business in an incredibly asset-sensitive or liability sensitive way. We've decided that we don't want to position ourselves to be too dependent on the exact timing, and that served us well last year. It served us well the year before and the year before that when we were preparing for what we felt was the inevitable series of rate hikes. And so, it's not in our base case that the Fed is going to hike again, but we wouldn't rule it completely out. And I think that's the way -- again, it's about being prepared, and it's about being resilient. And I think that's what you expect of the company, first and foremost.

Got it. And as you think about the behavior of deposits, be it the deposit mix or deposit growth from here, what are the key elements to drive growth and stabilize the mix as we look forward?

So, from a deposit point of view, specifically, it really is looking carefully business by business. And the answer is a little different in each one of those businesses. And so, the answer in terms of how do we drive good outcomes on deposits in Collateral Management versus in Treasury Services versus in Corporate Trust, where -- which is a terrific deposit franchise when you think about it, because you've got all of these pre-fundings that have to occur as part of the nature of the Corporate Trust business. And so, what we've done is we've -- I talked earlier on about platforms, we consider our liquidity business to be its own platform. We set it up as a platform, which means that we gave people and technology an org structure around ownership of deposits across the firm. So, it doesn't matter whether you're sitting in Treasury Services or Asset Servicing or Clearance and Collateral Management, you do not price and set your objectives of your deposits by yourself. You do it in partnership with our platform team on liquidity. And so, they're looking across and optimizing across all of those businesses across the alternatives for clients and helping clients make those decisions about what makes most sense for them. And so, there's a whole process around that, and that's how we think about optimizing the outcomes.

And that's Global Liquidity Solutions that you're referring to...

It is. That's exactly right.

I guess switching to fee revenue growth. And you talk about the medium-term 3- to 5-year outlook, what's the construct that you think about in terms of driving that fee revenue growth and making it a bit more resilient? Clearly, the markets, the macro will impact that, but how do you think about what, over time, should be a sustainable level of revenue growth and what are the 1 or 2 drivers that's going to drive that?

So, this is a huge focus for the company. Despite the fact that we didn't give fee guidance, you can sort of impute some from some of the other things that we've said. But we didn't do it partly for the reason that you just said, Ebrahim, which is given the fact the markets can go up and down and to some extent, fees do have some important input from markets, we've said, no, we're going to anchor ourselves on operating leverage. And we put out what we think is a stretch goal, but an important goal for us, which is we want to generate some positive, some being zero-plus, not negative operating leverage this year. Now look, there are conditions that you could imagine in the world that would make that very difficult. But we're pretty determined on this point, and we really want to drive hard at it. Now, to the extent the markets really cooperate with that, then there are easier pathways, pathways that are filled with more investment associated with getting to an outcome like that. To the extent the markets don't cooperate, then there are other ways of getting, but we're going to ultimately manage the company with the levers that we've got control over. Having said all of that, the answer to your question in terms of, what are the drivers of fees. So, for us, this is the work that started a couple of years ago. And so, Wove is a good example. Wove in Pershing, we gave some guidance for what we would expect that contribution to be in 2024. That's part of the story because that's fee revenue that we wouldn't have had last year or the year before. And that's a number that we would expect to grow into 2025. So, some of it is around truly new products, things that we haven't done before that we're doing now. Now to the extent that they are hockey stick-like things, we're quite cautious about those. We don't want too many of those at the same time. But, then there's the basic blocking and tackling of saying, hey, let's go after the opportunity to do more things with our existing clients. And so, if you are a client who just does one thing with us, how about this other thing? So, we have a whole variety of sales processes now that didn't really exist before that are associated with saying, let's do more with our existing client base. And so that hustle in the sales force, and our new Chief Commercial Officer has really been driving this. The practices, sales targets that are set for every salesperson in the company. We didn't use to have that, we have that now. And they're not just set by the people themselves and their manager. They're set by the Chief Commercial Officer team as well. And if you have a business which -- and you are a salesperson who covers a client who should be able to do other things with us, we've set you additional targets to go do those other things with us, not just to sit and milk the franchise for the opportunity, same thing that you did the year before. So, there's a whole set of things that are sitting behind that observation around driving more fees.

If you had a pie chart of the fee mix today and if you'd fast forward 5 years from now, where do you think the biggest differences are going to be today versus in the future? And maybe if you don't mind, Robin, just talk to us about Pershing a little bit, around the opportunity that has created for BK.

Well, fees in terms of the overall mix. First of all, we're very pleased with the fact that the durability, the annual recurring, stable nature of a lot of our fees, that's a real value point for us as a company. And we put a lot of emphasis into that. We do multiyear contracts. As you know, some of our contracts can be multiyear, 7 years. We recently signed a large contract with one particular client, just to give you a sense of it. So, there's something durable and recurring around that franchise. In terms of the overall mix, I think you would expect an increasing amount to come from clients who do more than one thing with us. And that's a good metric, and we can find ways to illustrate that over time, where we're really delivering solutions to a client, where we're assembling the products. This is how technology companies think. You've got a platform, a series of platforms or products, and then you're putting those things together in order to be able to make a sale to solve for a customer need. Customers don't think about necessarily, I want to buy this product from you. They say, I have this challenge or this problem. How are you going to help me solve that? And so, assembly of the different products and platforms that we have to create solutions, I think you'd see that over time. I'd like to think you'd see that evolve as well. Of course, traction on other new things that we are getting after. Those are all proof points that I would expect to see from the franchise. Now you asked about Pershing. As I think about the 3 business segments of the company, we've set out different objectives for each one of them, and we've talked publicly about that. In case of Securities Services, getting to a 30% margin. In the case of Investment and Wealth Management, we want to return ourselves to a 25%-plus margin. And in the case of Market and Wealth Services, it's -- we love the margin. We just want more. And so, let's invest, which is what we're doing. Wove is an example of that. Let's invest in Treasury Services, which we're doing real-time payment opportunities there. Let's invest in Clearance and Collateral Management plus it's a growth industry. And so there, I'd like to think that you're going to see more revenue dropping roughly at equivalent margins to the bottom line. And Pershing is an important part of that story. Wealth is one of the fastest and most important -- fastest-growing, most important segments of the U.S. financial services industry. We have $2.5 trillion worth of wealth assets on that platform. When you sit and look at us, you don't necessarily think as you might with UBS or with Morgan Stanley about trillions of dollars of wealth assets, because you look potentially just at our Wealth Management business. But that's a mistake because, yes, we've got that business, and it's a terrific business, but we've got $2.5 trillion on our Pershing platform, and we're delivering more solutions because that has been a clearance and custody business, but now we have Wove. So, it's not solving just for the investor needs, but solving for the advisor needs. And Wove is a terrific new product. And so that's broadening our aperture on the wealth market, and we start off with $2.5 trillion worth of connection in that space, which is, by most measures, a lot.

Got it. I guess -- and just maybe spending some time, maybe I've heard you talk about the 3 businesses and how you're thinking about investment allocation. Give us a sense of where you're leaning in, where you're trying to maximize margin because there's lack of growth. Like how are you thinking about that? And what are the 1 or 2 areas where you're really prioritizing investment-wise?

So, if you follow the rough contours of what I just said around Securities Services, Investment and Wealth Management and then our Market and Wealth Services segment, that's the macro version of that. As you get under the hood, the question becomes, okay, what are the various different things that we're doing in order to be able to create that outcome? Well, in our Securities Services business, although there are multiple businesses within that, but in that segment, in Asset Servicing in particular, it's about making the place simpler and more efficient for clients. It isn't about slashing costs. It is about helping clients to be able to get what they need more efficiently, reduce risk, reduce cost. I've done a lot of things in my career. And one of the things that I've learned is in these types of businesses, if you can make things simpler and you can make things more efficient, you can make them cheaper and you can reduce risk. And that's actually what the client wants. If you go back 10 years, there were relatively junior people at clients who are trying to commission highly bespoke, complex support things for their business because they were asking firms like ours to tailor what we did to their existing, maybe not perfect operating model. But that's not the best thing for them. What's better for them is to work and partner with us on solutions which are going to help their operating model to be efficient and more cost-effective so that we can actually reduce the cost of serving them and thereby not only reduce over time the cost of delivering the service, but increase our profitability along the way. That's a better way of doing it. And disproportionately in that business, we've got a lot of investments into doing those types of things. We've hired a new Head of Operations, and we're really digging into those types of processes, which are just inefficient. I think over time, AI can be quite helpful there as well. As opposed to, if you're looking at our Market and Wealth Services segment, it's more about the top line because the efficiency of the business there is quite good to start with. And so there, we want to drive new solutions, new capabilities. Examples again, Wove real-time payments, et cetera. As opposed to in Investment and Wealth Management. In Investment Management, there, we haven't fully leveraged the opportunity to deliver the manufacturing side of the business in Investment Management properly to our distribution channels, not only Wealth Management, but Pershing as a proxy for Wealth Management as well. And so better aligning our distribution capabilities, leveraging the fact that we know other firms that are ultimately distribution channels as well. We haven't leveraged that. So, there's a whole bunch of rewiring and plumbing going on in Investment Management, in particular, in terms of how we think about what is distribution.

Got it. I think you mentioned AI. And I think you talked about the applicability of some of the AI tools across the bank. One, I think if you just take a step back, like how much of AI is hype versus reality based on what you're seeing? And then when you bring that to a regulated banking institution, how easy is it to implement those tools and actually get those productivity enhancements?

So first of all, I think the technology is very, very powerful for our industry. It's got to be done well. It's got to be done safely. There are all sorts of manner of different bad ways to do things, but that's true with most things in life. You can find a bad use for many things in the world, but there are good uses available for many of them as well. And so, AI is a very powerful technology. I spent a good amount of time last year in the summer really studying up on the topic, spent a lot of time with various outside experts, just to make myself significantly more proficient in understanding the power of the tech and what it could do and how it would apply. And there's no question you can spend money badly in the space. It's perfectly straightforward to go spend $1 billion, build a custom large language model that you really don't need for our industry because the ability to take existing large language models and then create some customized training for them, which is relatively inexpensive, in order to be able to go out and prosecute the opportunities, that's very real. We've got NVIDIA chips, the right type, in our data centers our private cloud ready to go, and we're actually using them now for some of the use cases. I see 2 major threads of work on AI. One is going to be able to help develop better solutions for customers. You could come to us today, and we would deliver to you a software service that is entirely software-based that is powered by AI that will give you prediction, in the morning, on what's going to happen in the Treasury market with your fails and settlements in the afternoon, allowing you to say, hey, this security -- it will tell you, this security from this customer pair is likely to fail. What would you like to do about that? Do you want to just leave it be, and you'll have some fail costs? Or do you want to take evasive action and press go on our conveniently located side-by-side securities lending product to borrow the security in order to be able to make good the delivery? So, that is looking across half a million transactions every day, with permutations that sort of boggle the mind around, A is going to fail to B to C to D to E, and that whenever these clients exist in this particular sequence and combination, it tends to be that this other thing is going to happen. You can buy that from us today. It is Software as a Service. And there are going to be more things like that. Where we are able to take our unique breadth. We touch 20% of the world's investable assets. Our platforms, which have market-leading scale and therefore, visibility into what's going on, and create solutions that are going to help clients be able to make better decisions. I think that's very exciting. And then on the other side, to really, on the expense line, there are going to be things that are going to create more leverage to humans. It's going to take 10 minutes to do something that used to take an hour . It's going to be able to help people be able to get out of some of the drudgery that can exist in some jobs in an operations environment and actually focus themselves more on other things. And I think that is going to be another tailwind. I think those things will play out over time. It will take 2 or 3 years before we really, really see significant input into that. But I think it will be useful, and it will play itself out over the course of many years. And we can each take the over, under exactly how much it kicks in and when. To the point about regulation, look, there's a possibility here that regulation can just get this wrong and can stifle the opportunity for a period of time, sort of where your question was going. I actually like to think that our regulators are going to see through that risk and recognize that having the U.S. be a competitive place where innovation in the banking system is actually something that we prize, done right, regulated in the right way, sensible structures. But actually, it's a competitive advantage for the U.S. And so, I think regulators in the U.S., I'd like to give them the credit that, that's how they're going to think about it. I'm sure there will be some bumps along the way. But I think as a national policy, you can see the beginnings of this in DC with the President's executive order and the work that's been going on in the White House around AI. And then ultimately, how that's going to ripple through the various different agencies of government. I'm kind of a bit of an optimist on this, and I recognize that it will probably be a little bumpy, but I think it will be really, really sad for the U.S. if we didn't harness the power of a technology that really has been born here. And I just think that, that's unlikely that in the end of the day, we'll make that mistake.

I guess maybe just switching -- so you generate a lot of capital. It's a high ROE business. It's an asset-light business. Just remind us in terms of capital deployment priorities how you think about where you're allocating capital near-term, medium-term.

So you're right about the business. It's a very good business in terms of being capital-light and generating. And hence, we've been able over a period of time to return about 100% of net earnings back to shareholders. We care about the dividend. Having a healthy and growing dividend is something that we think is important. So that's part of the waterfall. But actually, returning capital to shareholders is at the bottom of our waterfall. And although it's something that we'll do and have been doing, we're not completely oblivious to the fact that there can be opportunities to invest in the business, but we're only going to do so when it really makes sense to do. We made the observation that last year, we thought 100%-plus was achievable. We delivered 123%. This year, we've said 100% or more again, and we think that's reasonable. And by the way, in '23, in an environment that has had some ups and downs for the marketplace, in this space, we actually grew capital inside the company. We thought that was the right thing to do, and we ended the year meaningfully above our minimums and actually above our internal targets as well. And we thought that was the right thing to do, given what was going on in the world.

And I think you pushed back on the notion of any near-term M&A. But when you look at sort of the breadth of the products that the bank today has, could M&A play a role not this year, but over the next few years? Or just you don't want to go down that path?

I think it's possible that it could. I said at the very beginning of my tenure that it really was not the right time to be thinking about that. We're 15, 16 months later now. It's still -- coming up in 18 months, it's still early in our journey. We've got a lot of opportunity in front of us with the blocking and tackling in the franchise. But transformational M&A, very, very high bar for stuff like that. But, to the extent that there are things that we see, that can help speed us on our journey, that will actually allow us to go quicker in unlocking the opportunity that we see in the businesses, we're always going to be open to things like that. Particularly if they're in the technology space and if they're sort of bite-size enough that we can look at them and we can see that will help us get from A to B meaningfully faster than we otherwise would. So, it's still a high bar because we've got so much opportunity in front of us, and we obviously don't want to be distracted from that. But we'll keep our eyes open as we go forward, and I think that's the right thing to do.

Got it. And I guess maybe just last couple of questions. One, I think last time we met, you kind of highlighted the analyst program that you had instituted, and I think there was some efficiency gains to be had from there. But just talk to us around junior folks who are graduating from college or senior-level talent. I mean I think we talked to most grads, there's a notion that banks are not cool. So how do you go through that process, be it fresh grads in terms of attracting technologists to BK? And how hard is that?

So, you're right that having an analyst program is a sensible thing to do from an efficiency point of view, but that absolutely has not been our primary objective. Our primary objective has been the fact that having the fresh ideas, the fresh engineering talent, all the capabilities that you get from campuses, we were just way underpenetrated in that space. So, we doubled it last year. We'll double it again this year in terms of the intake, and we think there's a lot of opportunity for that. It's kind of fun. The thing about BNY Mellon, yes, sure, we're a bank. We're America's oldest bank. There's some fun angles associated with our history, first stock to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, 240th year this year. Alexander Hamilton, who's now sort of a trendy dude. And so we attach ourselves to all of those things, and that's neat. And it does create a differentiation, by the way, versus some other banks. But we're also a platforms company. I talked before about the fact that we're doing a deliberate transformation of our operating model, but these platforms are at scale. We are the world's largest custodian. We are the world's largest clearer of U.S. Treasury securities. We are the world's largest collateral manager. We are the largest issuer services firm in the world. So, we're actually in a super interesting space in global financial markets. 40% of our revenue comes from outside of the U.S. But in the U.S., we're front and center of what goes on in the U.S. Treasury market. And when you step in to our command center room where we have -- where we really monitor all of what goes on at BNY Mellon from engineering point of view, and you see kids out of campus, they see the relevance of what we are doing to the world, and it's super interesting. Very true on the engineering side, as well. We've got a new AI hub with people dedicated to AI focused on that. We're solving interesting problems in the world, and we're relevant enough, but yet we have a culture that prizes what people do when they join our company. We've leveraged our benefits, and we've really invested in them. We've made everybody a shareholder. We care about what life at BNY Mellon is like, and kids have responded really well to that.

Got it. And just tied to that, I asked some of the other managements this question. When you think -- obviously, there's a big debate about the fight against inflation at the Fed. You're hiring all these people. You're investing in technology. Are you seeing inflation ebb? Do you feel confident that the Fed is actually making good progress, they will not have to hike again to bring inflation closer to their 2% target?

So, separating my view from the fact that we're prepared for the plus or the minus. I think that they are unlikely to have to hike again in the near term. I think they'll keep their options open as they should. Job #1 is to make sure that they feel that they've got the path to 2% pretty well secured. I don't think they're going to have to get to 2%, in order to be able to see a cut. They're just going to have to feel pretty confident that they're heading in that direction, unlikely to be disturbed on it. And then yes, and then at some point, we'll see some cuts. I've said before, I think the Fed did a very, very good job in '23 in the way they've handled all of this.

And the timing of QT and how low the overnight RRP goes, is that -- does that influence your thought process, just around the impact to your business or overall system liquidity?

So, we have a point of view, and obviously, we manage to that. We had a point when we started the year in terms of how it would play out. The QT, at some point, they're going to have to revisit this. There's debate inside the Fed about exactly what is excessive reserves. Is it anywhere between $3.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion, it's a big bid-offer spread. Our point of view is that the right level is probably a little higher than the Fed's historical thinking, but we'll see as we go through that process. There's a lot that's changed, in terms of the world, since they last looked at that. The world is pretty different in terms of liquidity today. And we've got a lot of different record money market funds, all -- corporate hoarding of cash, liquidity rules, lessons learned, that I think suggests it will probably be a different answer than 5 years ago, but we'll see.

Got it. I guess last question. You joined BK back in 2020 from Goldman. I'm sure you did your due diligence before you joined the company. Fast forward to today, just give us in terms of things that you can now look back and believe that you underappreciated by joining the bank and you have better appreciation of that today?

So, from a distance, and I took a gap year in between the 2 things. I didn't join straight from one from the other, which allowed me the benefit of reflection, in thinking about this. But from a distance, loved the firm's history, loved the firm's raw potential, actually liked the people, liked the way that they covered clients, but just felt that there was something missing in terms of leveraging the full opportunity. I saw an opportunity to come and maybe make a contribution to that. And now as I sit here today and having had the benefit of being in the company for a little while without being the CEO, so you really can see and feel and understand things at a different level. And now seeing the work that we've done in '23, I'm absolutely convinced that that original thesis was true. And so now it's the job of the team collectively, me as part of it, of course, to really unlock that. And as each month goes by through the close to 18 months so far, I feel like we've been continuing to validate that thesis. It's a ton of work, and it is a medium-term exercise, but so far, so good.

Got it. I guess on that note, thank you so much.

Great to be with you. Thank you, Ebrahim.

Thank you, sir.

Good to see you.