Bank of New York Mellon Corporation 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, operator.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter earnings call. I am here with Robin Vince, our CEO, and Dermot McDonogh, our CFO. As always, we will reference the quarterly update presentation, which can be found on the investor relations page of our website at bny.com. I will note that our remarks will contain forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Information about these statements and non-GAAP measures is available in the earnings press release, financial supplement, and quarterly update presentation, all of which can be found on the investor relations page of our website. Forward-looking statements made on this call speak only as of today, October 15, 2026, and will not be updated. With that, I will turn the call over to Robin.

Thank you, Marius, and good morning, everyone. I will start with an overview of BNY's performance in the third quarter, and then Dermot will walk you through our financial results and outlook in greater detail. Referring to page 2 of the quarterly update presentation, BNY delivered strong results in the third quarter. Earnings per share of $2.34 grew by 24% year-over-year at a very solid pre-tax margin of 39%, and with a strong return on tangible common equity of 29%. Once again, our growth was broad-based across our business segments, resulting in firm-wide revenue of $5.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year, generating approximately 390 basis points of positive operating leverage in the quarter, demonstrating the scalability of our business as well as our continued work to enable greater productivity.

As another signal to the diversification and resilience of our business model, we delivered these results against the backdrop of an overall constructive but uneven operating environment in the third quarter. Equity markets remained strong, supported by corporate earnings growth, as well as continued investments in AI capabilities and related infrastructure. At the same time, persistent inflation, a sharp repricing in interest rates, geopolitical tensions, and trade uncertainty contributed to volatility in fixed income markets and rotations across equity markets. Turning to our business performance. As many of you know, over the past few years, we have changed how BNY works. With two key building blocks for the reimagination of our company in place, the platform operating model, and our commercial model, we are able to operate with greater connectivity and deliver greater value to our clients. Our commercial results in the third quarter reinforce our progress.

Client demand continued to grow, with strong sales and pipelines across products, client segments, and regions, as well as larger, more comprehensive wins. As a result, the third quarter was our 15th consecutive quarter of year-over-year sales growth, with new mandates deepening existing relationships from digital native clients like Revolut to established institutions such as ING that are finding more ways to work with BNY in more places across more products. This continued momentum is driving higher organic growth and enabling an even more resilient and vibrant business built to support our clients with excellence through economic and market cycles. Changing how we worked was a prerequisite, but innovation is an increasingly important element of the BNY story.

With everyone in the company now working in our new operating models, our focus has shifted to realizing the benefits with product, engineering, operations, and commercial teams coming together to develop more integrated and innovative solutions and deliver them for clients at greater speed and scale. At its heart, BNY powers markets and advances the global financial system. We have done this over the entire history of the U.S. BNY supports the entire capital markets life cycle, from managing assets and collateral to servicing them and moving money. We view some of the current inflection points in market structure and technology as opportunities. As markets evolve, we have the vantage point and positioning to connect our capabilities in new ways, helping clients to adapt to changing market structures and pursue growth on infrastructure that they already trust. Several launches illustrate what that can look like.

In July, we announced the launch of our global Digital Transfer Agency capabilities, which extend our leading position in traditional fund servicing to the on-chain world, enabling a unified client servicing experience and ultimately growth into new asset classes and technologies. In the spirit of build it once, use it many, enabled by BNY Digital TA, we ourselves now offer a new digitally native money market fund through BNY Dreyfus with our new BLIQUID tokens representing shares in the fund on-chain. Baillie Gifford co-designed its recent on-chain offering with us and has already launched a fully native U.K.-regulated tokenized fund, and BlackRock is using our capabilities for a recently launched tokenized share class of one of their existing money market funds.

Just last month, our payments and trade business launched a new Pay-to-Wallet capability that allows banks to send cross-border payments directly from bank accounts to participating retail digital wallets using the payment messages and correspondent banking infrastructure from us that they already rely on. This gives banks another way to reach customers who use digital wallets and grow their cross-border payments businesses on BNY's global payments platform. Our thesis in digital assets remains simple: innovate the capabilities and act as a partner to our clients as we help them bridge to the digital world. On a related note, we couldn't have picked a better time to reimagine BNY than in this age of AI. We have said it consistently. At BNY, AI is for everyone, everywhere, and everything. So we are embedding AI in every aspect of our business.

That's why we've built our enterprise AI platform, Eliza, and invested in our people so we can develop capabilities, govern them consistently, and put them to work at scale. Over the past quarter, we've continued to move AI deeper into the processes that run our company. By deeply understanding our activity, including process steps, system interactions, workflow patterns, and more, Eliza is helping our teams reimagine how work gets done. In fact, over time, we see an opportunity to extend these AI capabilities to our clients to help them solve similar challenges and optimize workflows end to end. This work ultimately creates more capacity for our teams to better serve our clients and earn BNY a greater role in client relationships through improved features and capabilities. We are also pairing our ambition with the governance and accountability needed to scale AI responsibly.

Last month, we opened the BNY AI lab at Carnegie Mellon University, advancing research on topics like verifying AI-generated code and evaluating agents for use in critical systems. All of this reflects our broader approach to AI, moving with ambition, intensity, and discipline, all with the objective of running BNY better to drive enhanced commercial, operational, and financial performance. I'll conclude by summarizing where I see our company at this point in time. Our performance in the third quarter demonstrates what this team and this BNY are all about. Deliberate, innovative, and never satisfied. Our work to enable higher performance, greater connectivity between our platforms, and more seamless delivery of holistic solutions from across BNY to our clients continues, and we can already see that these foundational investments have laid the groundwork for our further growth.

With our resilient and trusted platforms deeply embedded in workflows and the breadth of capital markets worldwide, BNY's diversified businesses enable our clients to adapt and thrive. All of this laid against the secular trend of financial markets growing, deepening, and evolving. Collectively, this allows us to go after the white space across products, client segments, and regions better than ever before, creating value for our clients and shareholders. Put simply, we remain excited and energized by our momentum and the opportunity ahead. With that, I'll turn it over to Dermot.

Thank you, Robin, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with our consolidated financial results for the third quarter on page 3 of the presentation. Total revenue of $5.7 billion was up 12% year over year. Fee revenue was also up 12%. That included 15% growth in Investment Services fees, reflecting net new business, higher client activity, and higher market values. Investment Management and Performance fees were up 3%, primarily driven by higher market values, partially offset by the mix of AUM flows. Firm-wide AUC/A of $63.4 trillion were up 10% year over year. This increase was primarily driven by higher market values, net client inflows, and net new business, partially offset by the unfavorable impact of a stronger U.S. dollar. Assets under management of $2.2 trillion were up 2% year over year, primarily driven by high year over year, reflecting higher client volumes supported by continuous product innovation.

Investment and other revenue was $175 million in the quarter. Net interest income was up 15% year-over-year, primarily driven by reinvestment of investment securities at higher yields, as well as balance sheet growth, partially offset by deposit margin compression. The provision for credit losses was negligible in the quarter. Expenses of $3.5 billion were up 8% year-over-year, both on a reported basis and excluding notable items. More than three-quarters of the increase represents revenue related expenses. The remainder reflects higher investments, partially offset by efficiency savings. Taken together, we reported earnings per share of $2.34, up 24% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of notable items, earnings per share were $2.37, also up 24%. On the back of approximately 390 basis points of positive operating leverage, pre-tax margin expanded to 39% and return on tangible common equity was 29%.