BNY (BNY Mellon) Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

I guess sometimes it is always more fun to look back than to look forward. I would say looking back, for those who are not close to the stock and are kind of learning about us or those who are actually with us and have been following, a little bit of a reflection on the shareholder letters. We put a lot of time, Robin puts a lot of time into those letters. The first year was all about, I would say, reflection, understanding. Robin used the phrase, "BNY has a great culture. It has good bones and a diversified portfolio of businesses." It was all about establishing credibility with our investors, the market, putting out simple guides. I think, as I was saying to you before, this is my fourth time being here with you.

2023 was all about getting expenses back under control, 8% to 2.7, buybacks north of 100%. I think we did 126 that year. NII guidance 20%, and I think we ended up 24%, 25%. So establishing credibility all the time, creating the strategy and the vision for the future and the mechanisms that we put into place, whether it be the new way of working at BNY, we call the platform operating model. The commercial model under the chief commercial officer, which has had a lot of success over the last couple of years, 14 consecutive quarters of sales growth. So real momentum because as a leadership team, you have to put down infrastructure and foundations on which you can run the company over the future, because you need more than words to execute strategy.

While it may sound a little bit consultanty, be more for clients, run our company better, empower our culture, are really the three things that we talk about internally at the firm and the behaviors with which we want people to show up. I would say Robin's, as chairman and CEO, the biggest success over the last three years is getting the population of the employee base of the firm as shareholders rallying around the message. He's given the firm back a sense of confidence about what's possible, and people are more ambitious for the firm and for themselves, and that's translated into results which we feel very proud of. So really, it's been about the culture which has driven everything else.

Robin has two birthdays every year, his corporate birthday and his birthday. September 1st is his corporate birthday, and so I wished him happy birthday a couple of weeks ago. He's into year 5. I think for the room and for the audience, we've kind of moved off the word transformation. We're about strategy, vision, delivering for clients, growth, products, innovation, digital, AI, not like, "Oh, how much is room to run in your transformation? Is it over?" It's not really over. It's all about what's next. Northstar, positive operating leverage. We feel like we have a lot of opportunity. We've really stood up our strategy office in a very thoughtful way this year, and we feel a lot of opportunity and a lot more work and opportunity to do internally to deliver more for clients.

And you can see that in the sales performance, the new logos. I did a trivia. I walked around a few weeks ago. We have this commercial liftoff seminar every year, and I asked all our commercial people, we've roughly 8 lines of business at BNY. How many clients buy from all 8? Yeah, trivia question. You're asking me?

No. I'll ask you, yeah.

Okay. Most people don't know the answer to that.

There was only one firm who bought from all 8. That tells you about opportunity for the future. We quote a lot of metrics on the earnings call about north of 60% increase in people from buying from 3 or more lines of business over the last couple of years. Last year, of total sales, 10% were new logos. That's been repeated again this year. But still, the biggest opportunity for BNY is doing more with the clients that we have in addition to attracting new logos. That's phase 2. Client service, unreasonable hospitality, stitching the firm together, integrated solutions, to kind of put some evidence behind the words. Look, this time last year, important piece of public policy, Treasury accounts, we weren't really talking about. Now it's executed. It's live, July 4th.

Phase 2, we are working on with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and in partnership with Robinhood. That is kind of, I think, a meaningful demonstration of platform operating model and the ability of BNY to react in a strategic and thoughtful way with the government and with Robinhood to deliver an outcome for the future of America. That is something that we feel very proud of that is a validation of our strategy and our way forward.