Northern Trust Corp Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Thanks, Jason. Congrats. I also heard record number of people at this conference.

Yeah. 24th year. Congratulations. Thank you.

That's a big deal. It is.

Thank you. All right. Appreciate that.

Before we dig in, I will let Dave kick off and do the corporate side. I will just say it was really funny. Two years ago, we were here and we did meetings all day, and we had the press release lined up to be distributed as we came off stage. The timing was really funny because if we had started this right after the market closed, then I think it was 20 minutes, we actually were thinking about announcing it so that we could talk about it on stage. But I promise, at least to my knowledge, there is no press release about org change teed up for this afternoon.

Yeah. No, I think from the corporate end, the idea behind One Northern was really to take a lot of the concepts we developed for Global Family Office, which sort of sits at the center of the Venn diagram of all our businesses, and take that sort of DNA and knowledge and push it out so that a lot of our clients could benefit from the same kind of synergy across all the businesses. Ironically, Jason and I actually put together a large part of that when he was running distribution within asset management. So it has been a really iterative process, but I think it has been great for the firm overall. So I think that is one of the biggest changes. The second big change really has been how we allocate capital and how we look at productivity and expense.

I think all credit to the entire management team at Northern for kind of getting on board with this. But it is really a focus of figuring out productivity first. Once you have got that sort of bucket nailed down, then you can inform how much you can invest in a given year, and then that will inform how much expense growth you are going to get. A lot of that discipline has been driven over the last couple of years, which is why I think you have seen that we have been pretty good at keeping our expenses sort of where we want them to be.

Then we won't both answer every question, but since you asked specifically on this one, I think people have heard us talk about One Northern, so we're at least trying to illustrate for investors what does that really mean practically for the business. A few things. One is, I think even as you think about our alternatives business, our clients were telling us they wanted to be doing more in alternatives. We had capabilities there, but they wanted us to accelerate. We didn't have to go to the market and establish new partnerships. Our internal proprietary 50 South business is one of the industry leaders in alts, largely in fund of funds, but also very strong in doing alternatives advisory for the very upper end of our client base, including GFO business, which Dave ran for nine years.

That's a good example of how we've come together, and we've had really successful launches coming out of that with their partnerships with managers being able to leverage the fact that they've got such a strong captive client base internally. That's been really helpful. Then even in marketing, we work really hard on the upper end of the market, but we do a lot of digital marketing as well. There are a lot of people that are selling their business, and they're thinking about what to do once that liquidity takes place. They may not know a list of two or three or four firms or who's the best, so we've been working internally with our marketing team to aggressively go after that space so people are able to find us when they're doing research, and it's changed a lot.

It's not just doing URL searches anymore. Now LLMs are so much more important, so that's been a key component of what we've been doing. Then even in our other corporate groups like HR, we've been ramping up very aggressively how we're thinking about recruiting and even retaining talent.

Yeah. So maybe I will answer that one way more qualitatively and then in another more quantitatively. Qualitatively, what has jumped out at me in the last two years is that both clients and also potential partners, they want to be part of Northern Trust. Last week I was on the phone with a client, very sophisticated, very large client who runs a financial services company. I called him to give him a really small update on something that he and I have been talking about. What I thought was going to be a 30-second conversation, he said, "Look, while I have you, I want to run something by you." He has been thinking about changing the dynamics of the business to bring somebody else in. It turns into a 40-minute conversation and me introducing him to a couple of subject matter experts in the company.