Good morning and welcome to the 2025 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call hosted by BNY. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference call and webcast will be recorded and will consist of copyrighted material. You may not record or rebroadcast these materials without BNY's consent. I will now turn the call over to Marius Merz, BNY Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Second Quarter Earnings Call. I'm here with Robin Vince, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dermot McDonogh, our Chief Financial Officer. 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, July 15th, 2025, and will not be updated. With that, I will turn it over to Robin. Thanks, Marius. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Before Dermot takes you through the financials in greater detail, I'll start with a few summary remarks on our strong performance in the second quarter and a couple of reflections on the first half of the year. Stepping back for a moment to look at the operating environment, we began the quarter in April with elevated market volatility, record U.S. equity trading activity, and increased Treasury market volumes. Through the quarter, we saw shifts in global policy with elevated risk from geopolitical tensions and conflicts, as well as uncertainty around trade, fiscal, and other policies. Periods of volatility and active markets give BNY the opportunity to deepen the connection with our clients, helping them grow while navigating an evolving business landscape. Our unique position as a financial services platforms company at the heart of the world's capital markets. Combined with our diversified business model, allowed us to once again demonstrate our resilience and commercial strength against this backdrop. Turning to the results of the second quarter and referring to page two of the quarterly update presentation, BNY delivered a strong performance. Earnings per share of $1.93 were up 27% year-over-year on a reported basis and up 28% excluding notable items. Total revenue was up 9% year-over-year and for the first time exceeded $5 billion in a quarter. In combination with expense growth of 4%, BNY generated another quarter of significant positive operating leverage, roughly 500 basis points on both the reported and operating basis. In what is seasonally our strongest quarter, our pre-tax margin improved to 37%. Our return on tangible common equity improved to 28%. These are clear outputs from our multi-year transformation and robust indicators of BNY's potential. Turning to page three, over the past few years, we have been laying the foundations for our future. In our January update, we outlined how BNY is well-positioned to capture market beta and capitalize on evolving market trends as we work hard to generate alpha through the continued transformation of our company. We entered 2025 with good momentum. Midway through the year, we are seeing results from our consistent execution and continuous delivery that add to our confidence for the medium to long term. Our strategy is simple but powerful: to be more for our clients by running our company better, all powered by our culture. I'll briefly touch on each. First, our commercial model enables BNY to be more for our clients, helping them achieve their goals using the full breadth and depth of our platforms. As we mark the model's one-year anniversary, early signs point to the growing effectiveness of our commercial organization with significant runway ahead. We achieved a second consecutive quarter of record sales. The number of multi-product relationships continues to grow, and we continue to broaden and deepen our engagement with clients. For example, in June, we expanded our relationship with specialist active U.K. asset manager Liontrust. In addition to utilizing our Data Vault and middle office operating capabilities, Liontrust is fully outsourcing its trading to our buy-side trading solutions team, which delivers 24-hour global trade execution and reaches 100 markets globally across all major asset classes. Another important way for us to be more for our clients is to deliver innovative solutions to the market that come from the powerful combination of capabilities we have at BNY. As I've said before, we're not just in the product sales business; we're in the solutions delivery business. BNY enjoys a suite of highly adjacent platforms that, when delivered together, create powerful solutions for clients. Our commercial model, combined with our platform's operating model, are intentionally designed to encourage more of this type of innovation. An example of this solutions mindset is our work to build the financial infrastructure of the future by bridging traditional and digital financial ecosystems to enable clients to unlock new capabilities securely and at scale. Early and continuous investments in our digital assets platform have positioned us to meet increasing institutional interest and adoption. Last month, Société Générale selected BNY to act as reserve custodian for their first USD stablecoin in Europe. Last week, Ripple announced that BNY will act as primary custodian of Ripple's USD stablecoin reserves. Today, BNY is a leader in servicing the growing stablecoin market, enabling companies to create and use stablecoins by providing wide-ranging services from issuance to ongoing operations. Our advancements in the digital assets ecosystem are just one example of continual innovation, but there are many others: flexible financing and global clearing, the integration of Collateral One into Liquidity Direct, FX Hedge Direct for private markets, agency lending in Saudi Arabia, depository receipts in Canada, to name just a few. This is an important theme for us, not just periodic higher-profile product launches, but product-level micro-innovations, week by week, month by month, that drive our organic growth. Next, on running our company better with purpose. 2025 will be a milestone year for BNY's transition into our platform's operating model, which realigns how we work and organize ourselves across the entire company. As a reminder, running our company better is not just about expenses; it is about better. Yes, we are driving efficiency, but we are also enabling commercial opportunities, enhancing client journeys, and accelerating speed to market. With more than half of our people at BNY working in the model today, we remain on track to complete our phased transition into the platform's operating model by this time next year. Already, we are starting to see the impact of this new way of working, enabling our people to launch more new solutions, deploy more code releases, and come together better than ever before to support our clients. Finally, on culture. Culture is about generating a collective will to make our company achieve its full potential. Harnessing the breadth of our talent to be there for clients and to help the company hum. This includes so many things, but one part of that enablement is our embrace of AI. It's an exciting moment for AI at BNY. Nearly all of our employees are using our multi-agentic enterprise AI platform, Eliza, and we have started to introduce digital employees into our workforce. It's early days, but we are beginning to see the benefit of some of these agents and digital employees, and we expect that to accelerate in the quarters and years ahead. To wrap up. Against the backdrop of a busy operating environment, our priorities are clear, and we remain relentlessly focused on execution. BNY is showing strong momentum, and we are determined to deliver further value for our clients, our shareholders, and our people. At this midpoint of the year, we are pleased to see the initial work of our multi-year transformation bearing fruit. I'd like to thank our teams around the world for delivering strong results and for their continued commitment to the work ahead. We have a lot of opportunity in front of us, the strategy to unlock it is working. With that, over to you, Dermot. Thank you, Robin, and good morning, everyone. I'm starting with our consolidated financial results for the second quarter on page four of the presentation. Total revenue of $5 billion was up 9% year-over-year. Fee revenue was up 7%. That included 9% growth in investment services fees from our security services and market and wealth services segments, driven by net new business, client activity, and higher market values. Investment management and performance fees were flat. Growth from higher market values and the impact of a weaker U.S. dollar was offset by the mix of AUM flows and the adjustment for certain rebates that we discussed on our last earnings call. While not on the page, I will note that firm-wide AUC of $55.8 trillion were up 13% year-over-year, reflecting client inflows, higher market values, and the impact of the weaker dollar. Assets under management of $2.1 trillion were up 3% year-over-year, reflecting higher market values and the impact of the weaker dollar, partially offset by cumulative net outflows. Foreign exchange revenue was up 16% year-over-year on the back of elevated volatility and higher volumes, partially offset by the impact of corporate treasury activity. Investment and other revenue was $184 million, including $35 million of net losses from investment security sales, partially offset by favorable seed capital and other investments results. Net interest income was up 17% year-over-year, driven by continued reinvestment of maturing investment securities at higher yields, as well as balance sheet growth, partially offset by changes in deposit mix. Provision for credit losses was a benefit of $17 million in the quarter, driven by property-specific reserve releases in our commercial real estate portfolio. Expenses of $3.2 billion were up 4% year-over-year, both on a reported basis and excluding notable items. The variance excluding notable items reflects higher investments, employee merit increases, higher revenue-related expenses, and the unfavorable impact of the weaker dollar, partially offset by efficiency savings. Taken together, we reported earnings per share of $1.93 on a reported basis, up 27% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of notable items, earnings per share were $1.94, up 28% year-over-year. Our pre-tax margin was 37%, and our return on tangible common equity was 28% in the quarter. Turning to capital and liquidity on page five. At the end of June, the Federal Reserve released the results of its 2025 bank stress test, which once again underscored BNY's resilient business model and our strong balance sheet. The results also confirmed that our stress capital buffer remains unchanged at the regulatory floor of 2.5%. With regards to our second quarter results, our tier one leverage ratio was 6.1%. Down 17 basis points sequentially. Tier one capital increased by $689 million, primarily reflecting capital generated through earnings and a net increase in accumulated other comprehensive income, partially offset by capital returns through common stock repurchases and dividends. Average assets increased, primarily driven by deposit growth. Our CET1 ratio at the end of the quarter was 11.5%, unchanged from the prior quarter. Over the course of the second quarter, we returned approximately $1.2 billion of capital to our common shareholders, resulting in a 92% total payout ratio year to date. With regards to liquidity, the consolidated liquidity coverage ratio was 112%, down 4 percentage points sequentially, reflecting elevated deposit balances, which were largely non-operational in early parts of the quarter. The consolidated net stable funding ratio was 131%, down 1 percentage point sequentially. Next, net interest income and balance sheet trends on page six. Consistent with the backdrop of elevated volatility and active trading in capital markets, we saw clients seek the strength of BNY's balance sheet and leverage our platforms for execution and settlement. Net interest income of $1.2 billion was up 17% year-over-year and up 4% quarter over quarter. Both the year-over-year and sequential increase primarily reflect continued reinvestment of maturing investment securities at higher yields, as well as balance sheet growth, partially offset by changes in deposit mix. Average deposit balances grew by 6% sequentially. Non-interest-bearing deposits grew by 3% in the quarter, and interest-bearing deposits grew by 7%. Accordingly, average interest-earning assets increased by 6% sequentially. Cash and reverse repo balances increased by 9%. Investment securities balances increased by 4%, and loans increased by 2%. Turning to our business segments starting on page seven. Security services reported total revenue of $2.5 billion, up 10% year-over-year. Total investment services fees were up 10% year-over-year. In asset servicing, investment services fees grew by 7%, reflecting higher market values and client activity. In issuer services, investment services fees were up 17%, driven by exceptionally strong client activity in our depository receipts business. In this segment, foreign exchange revenue was up 22% year-over-year on the back of elevated volatility and higher volumes. Net interest income for the segment was up 13% year-over-year. Segment expenses of $1.6 billion were up 4% year-over-year, driven by higher investments, employee merit increases, revenue-related expenses, and the unfavorable impact of the weaker dollar, partially offset by efficiency savings. Security services reported pre-tax income of $867 million, up 26% year-over-year, and a pre-tax margin of 35%. Onto market and wealth services on page eight. In our market and wealth services segment, we reported total revenue of $1.7 billion, up 13% year-over-year. Total investment services fees were up 9% year-over-year. In Pershing, investment services fees were up 8%, reflecting client activity and higher market values. Net new assets were a negative $10 billion in the quarter, reflecting the deconversion of a client that was acquired by a self-clearing competitor. In clearance and collateral management, investment services fees were up 14%, driven by broad-based growth in collateral balances and clearance volumes. In treasury services, investment services fees were up 3%, reflecting net new business. Net interest income for the segment was up 21% year-over-year. Segment expenses of $897 million were up 8% year-over-year, driven by higher investments and litigation reserves, employee merit increases, and higher revenue-related expenses, partially offset by efficiency savings. Taken together, our market and wealth services segment reported pre-tax income of $851 million, up 21% year-over-year, and a pre-tax margin of 49%. Turning to investment and wealth management on page nine. Our investment and wealth management segment reported total revenue of $801 million, down 2% year-over-year. Investment management fees were down 1% year-over-year, driven by the mix of AUM flows and the adjustment for certain rebates, partially offset by higher market values and the favorable impact of the weaker dollar. Segment expenses of $653 million were down 2% year-over-year, driven by lower revenue-related expenses and efficiency savings, partially offset by higher severance expense and the unfavorable impact of the weaker dollar. Investment and wealth management reported pre-tax income of $148 million, down 1% year-over-year, and a pre-tax margin of 19%. As I described earlier, assets under management of $2.1 trillion were up 3% year-over-year. In the second quarter, we saw $17 billion of net outflows driven by index, multi-asset, and equity strategies, partially offset by net inflows into cash and fixed income strategies. Wealth management client assets of $339 billion increased by 10% year-over-year, largely driven by higher market values. Page 10 shows the results of the other segment. For this segment, I'll just note that the sequential decrease in revenue primarily reflects the net losses from investment securities activity I mentioned earlier, while the sequential decrease in expenses reflects lower litigation reserves and severance. Turning to page 11, I'll close with a mid-year update of the financial outlook for 2025 that we provided on our earnings call in January. As you can see on the slide, BNY is entering the second half of the year with great momentum, while we remain cognizant of the economic outlook amid elevated geopolitical and policy uncertainty. Based on where we sit today, looking out to the balance of the year, we now expect full year 2025 net interest income to be up high single-digit percentage points year-over-year. We continue to expect solid fee revenue growth in 2025, of course market-dependent. We now expect expenses excluding notable items for the year to be up approximately 3% year-over-year. We continue to expect our effective tax rate for the full year to be in the 22%-23% range. Considering our 21% tax rate in the first half, that means approximately 23% for the second half of the year. We continue to expect to return roughly 100% ± of 2025 earnings through common dividends and buybacks over the course of the year. Following the release of the Federal Reserve's annual bank stress test, our board of directors declared a 13% increase of our quarterly common stock dividend, and we plan to continue repurchasing common shares under our existing share repurchase program. As always, we consider macroeconomic and interest rate environments, balance sheet growth, and many other factors with a conservative bias in managing the pace of our buybacks. To wrap up, BNY posted very strong results in the second quarter, demonstrating the impact of consistent execution and delivery amid a complex but yet for BNY constructive operating environment. The momentum of our multi-year transformation continues to build, and progress to date gives us incremental confidence in BNY's great potential for the medium and long term. With that, Operator, can you please open the line for Q&A? If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad now. As a reminder, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one related follow-up question. We'll take our first question from Ebrahim Poonawala with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning. Morning, Ibrahim. Maybe Robin, for you. The call in terms of the transformation efforts, digital assets, AI just sounds like significant runway on all things organic. Address for us how you're thinking about capital deployment relative to where the stock's trading at today. I'm sure this is not news to you in terms of news around BNY pursuing a merger with a competitor, your interview in Barron's. Give us a sense of when we think about capital deployment as shareholders, how should we think what the priority is outside of funding the business, be it buybacks versus M&A? Thanks. Sure. Look, the beginning point of what you said is actually the most important thing. We have got strong momentum. We really see the pathway to be able to generate value over the medium and long term. Obviously, you're seeing some of the early signs of that, and we're pleased with it. That is our biggest focus because at the end of the day, at the top of the capital waterfall is that ability to invest in the business. Now, look, the good news is that we're a pretty capital-light business. You can see it in the 28% ROTCE that we generated in the quarter. We're pleased with that. That's another sign of the transition and transformation of the company towards this more platforms orientation because that is the sort of feature that you'd expect of a company in terms of the direction of travel that we've got going. Now, in terms of the inorganic stuff, look, our broad approach hasn't changed, which is M&A done well can be a powerful tool in the toolkit. It's not our custom to comment on any specific rumor or speculation, but I think we demonstrated last year with the Archer acquisition that we've got the ability to make M&A work for us in a sensible way. Having said that, I just really want to underscore this point. It's a very high bar for us for M&A, especially a larger transaction. It would have to make a ton of sense. We'd need to have a lot of conviction and execution. We're focused on ongoing alignment with our strategic priorities. Strong cultural fit matters. Of course, the financials really have to work. Our M&A story is a two-sided story as well because you saw that last year. We bought Archer, but we sold our corporate trust Canada business. The punchline I'll leave you with is we are focused on our organic growth. That is working. We are beginning the process of a multi-year journey on that. We are going to be open because we should be open to sensible things inorganically if they make sense, but I'll underline again, if they make sense. That was very clear. Thank you. I guess maybe just following up on that. You referenced the 27% ROTCE this quarter. I get it's a seasonally strong quarter. As we think about, again, relative to new investors trying to put money to work in the stock, if structurally, based on all the work you've done so far over the last few years and where things are going, is it safe for investors, shareholders, the street to assume that this is becoming a high 20s ROTCE institution, which should then support a very different multiple than we've been used to for the last several years? Thanks. Look, I'll blend sort of two things together here. One is the broader medium-term targets as we think about them. We have not put a ceiling on any of our medium-term targets. We viewed them as milestones on a longer journey. At the time that we first communicated them, people understandably thought about them as ambitious based on where we had been in the past. We are on a journey here, and we are making important steps forward. On ROTCE specifically, we do not see a ceiling on that number because as a more platforms-oriented company, remember, NII is only 25% of our revenues, view that as broadly a proxy for the balance sheet, which means three-quarters of our business is largely a pretty capital-light business. That is driving forward in terms of fee growth. I would just look generally at our medium-term targets, and I would throw ROTCE, your question, into that as well, and say we have a lot of ambition. We think we are relatively early in our journey, and we are absolutely going to be moving the bar higher on ourselves, which frankly, we do every single day in terms of how we run the company. Perfect. Thank you, Robin. Thanks. We'll move to our next question from Ken Houston with Autonomous Research. Your line is now open. Hey, good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask about just the evolution of, as the year goes on, of just overall top-of-the-house performance because obviously, you're taking up your NII guide, but NII is only 25% of revenues. And while the cost guide is up, I think maybe misses the point that on the fee side, your guide is only just for year-over-year, and here we are +6% in the second quarter and +7% for the year to date. So I'm just wondering, on the fee side, are fees better than your original expectations too? And is that informing as much as the NII upside. The slight drip up on the overall cost guide as the total is coming in better? Hey, Ken, I'll start with that. Look, the way I kind of think about the firm is I start with overall positive operating leverage. I guess a key message I would leave you there, both on operating and reported basis, I think it was roughly 500 basis points of operating leverage. Since Robin took over as CEO, we've kind of made the positive operating leverage our North Star. Consistently delivering that to the market has been our kind of the core strategy around how we think about the financials. You have three components to that. You've got fees, you've got NII, and you've got expenses. You'll see from the financials, yeah, revenue up 9%, expenses up 4%. Delivering that positive operating leverage. Within the revenue, you've got fees, you've got NII, really solid. Performance on NII, which gives us comfort around for the balance of the year, giving a higher guide to kind of high single digits. On the revenue side, I think the strength in fees really underscores the commercial model that we launched about a year ago, two consecutive quarters of kind of record sales. Notwithstanding that, the second quarter is a seasonally strong quarter, so we would expect strong sales, but that was on the back of a Q1. We see going into Q3, although it is a kind of seasonally slower quarter for us given the vacations, etc., we see kind of strong momentum continuing. You see a picture on page three of the mid-year update where we kind of show you a little pictorial about how we think about organic growth. We have high conviction around that beginning to build and grow. Ken, let me just build on a couple of things that Dermot said. First of all, yes, it was a constructive environment in the second quarter. I will bring you back to our comments in January when we talked about the various different things that drive our business. We have intentionally been repositioning the company gradually to be able to take advantage of more different types of environments. I think the punchline is, there are always amazing environments that you could have for a business or potentially environments which just do not have any element of being particularly constructive. We think we are broadening out the probabilities of any given environment actually working reasonably well for us because equity markets up, fixed income markets up, equity volumes up, fixed income volumes up, transaction volumes and GDP up, issuance up, asset management activity, wealth management activity. There are a lot of cylinders in this particular engine. The second quarter was constructive, but we have been positioning the company to be able to take advantage of more and more environments as constructive. I think that, plus the point that Dermot made around our commercial model, is allowing us to grind organic growth higher. We want to take advantage of the beta. We want to be able to participate in whatever the quarter happens to bring. This constant focus on Alpha generation in terms of how we're running the company and positioning the company is an important part of the story. We do think that this is a quarter where you're starting to see that. The early earnings point that Dermot and I have made many times before, there's a lot of runway here in our estimation. Understood. That's very color. I do like that upper right chart on page three. Just one thing on the environment then. You've talked previously about just the stickiness of deposits, and obviously, that's informing the better-than-expected NII outlook. Does anything change in the environment at that point? I think, Robin, we'll bring back in your point about tools in the kit and arsenal to just continue to add deposits. Maybe you can just help us understand the environmental side a little bit. Thank you. I think point number one here that I would make, Ken, is as a matter of strategy, we don't really lead with deposits. When you see deposits being a little bit higher, the mix of IB and IB a little bit higher, it really speaks to the breadth and the depth of the franchise and doing more with clients. Doing more with clients attracts deposits. Specifically around second quarter, in our corporate trust business, we had higher levels of activity, and we were able to kind of help clients with unique specific situations that attracted deposits into the system, particularly on the NIB side. That was able for us to kind of have a good NII print this quarter. When we look out for the balance of the year and run our various scenarios, we really have reduced the tails with respect to interest rate sensitivity. That was really on the back of a ton of work done towards the back end of last year when the Fed made the pivot after Jackson Hole around the forward rate curve. That gives us now a lot of confidence to be able to kind of provide that higher NII growth against what is a constructive backdrop for us. Thanks very much, guys. Our next question comes from Glenn Schorr with Evercore ISI. Your line is now open. Hi, thanks very much. With so much going well, forgive me, I'm going to pick on the one area that was not as good as everything else in investment management. Fees down a little bit, flows out, margins down in that 2019 range, despite the good market. The question is, if we step back a little bit and we talk about, can we talk a little bit about what investments you are making to improve the business and what is high on your to-do list to help drive better performance as we move forward in investment management? Thanks. Thanks for the question, Glenn. I would say. Investment number one was Robin appointing José as the leader of that business. He started last September. You can see between the first quarter where we had a margin of 8% to this quarter where we are about 19%. You can see that step up in margin. You can see José is beginning to work the opportunity and making some decisions to right-size it from an efficiency standpoint. I am very pleased with what José has done. What I also think he is doing very, very effectively, and look, both Robin and myself have talked about this on prior quarters, the 1BNY approach in terms of desiloing the firm, you kind of have to go that extra mile as it relates to our investment and wealth management strategy and bringing the boutiques closer to the firm. I think José sees a lot of opportunity for us to cross-sell within the firm, both within our asset servicing business and within our purging business. Bringing the strength of our manufacturing capabilities to our purging clients and our asset servicing clients is a kind of a key forward strategy that we can see we can do well at. Also bringing in leadership and product development. I think you're going to see more positive stories coming from this particular segment. As with all transformations, it takes a little bit of time, and José is getting that time to make the decisions that he needs to. Glenn, let me just build on one particular point that Dermot just made. One of José's early observations about the business was we have a terrific, to use Dermot's term, manufacturing base. If you look under the hood of our $2.1 trillion of AUM, you have some real market-leading franchises. We have Insight, which is number one in its market. That's a trillion dollars of it right there. You have Walter Scott, which is terrific, long-only, long-dated equity manager. You have a terrific business in the form of Dreyfus as money markets. We have, in Mellon, a direct indexer that's capable of being able to create product that our asset servicing clients are very interested in. Obviously, it also has a lot of relevance for the $3 trillion of wealth distribution that we have in Pershing. If you think about the manufacturing base, let's give ourselves a check that we have a pretty good set of businesses that are actually performing pretty well. On the distribution, if we didn't have BNY, then you could look at asset management, and you could say there are a lot of parallels with other mid-size to large asset managers, and the question of distribution would be on everybody's lips. One of José's observations was, wow, this investment manager at BNY is one of the reasons why I joined BNY because there's all of this distribution potential, but we just haven't fully unlocked it. Okay. What sits in the middle? That's the word that Dermot used, product, where if you take a metaphor for this for a second. Imagine that you were a Coke or a Pepsi, and you were making. A beverage, and you had to concentrate, and you have all of this terrific distribution because you can sell in restaurants, you can sell in grocery stores, you can sell in the corner store as well. In the middle of that is a critical point of product, which is, are you taking the manufacturing base that you have and making cans when you want to sell it in the corner store? If you put bottles of concentrate in the corner store, it is not going to help you. When you are delivering to a large fast food outlet, there you want to be able to deliver the concentrate; cans are not as useful. This piece in the middle, this product shaping that leverages the manufacturing base with an eye to the distribution channels that you have available to you is critical. I think we have not done as good a job on that as we could. That is a very big focus for us. We think that when you take all of those things together, there is an interesting pathway here. Thanks for all that. Maybe I could do a tiny follow-up on the previous question. Forgive me if you said it, but the fee revenue, we are up 5% for the first half, and the guide is still, quote, up on the year. Markets are higher. Despite this conversation we just had on investment management, it feels like deliberately conservative, which I am cool with. I am just curious on how we square the up 5% for the first half. Markets are trending well. Your momentum is good. Why would not the fee outlook be better? I know I asked you that last quarter, and you outperformed. The way I would answer it, it's like, there are a lot of factors that go into the fee, a lot of external factors that we do not necessarily control, very market dependent. We kind of go back to the foundational building blocks of the platform operating model and the commercial model, which is still only a year old, but it is working. You can see it. We have higher conviction about our ability to drive organic fee growth from here. We have changed a lot over the last three years, Glenn, about the transparency of our numbers and how we give you a lot more than we did three years ago. I think as we get more conviction and as we get more kind of sales telemetry around us, we will give you more guidance as we feel comfortable. For now, I think the momentum is there. The upper trajectory is there, but we're not ready to yet guide on specifics around fees. Third quarter is usually a seasonally slower quarter, and Q2 is a seasonally strong quarter. It is important to be balanced in that as well. Fair enough. Thanks for all that. Thanks, Glenn. We'll move to our next question from Betsy Graseck with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, Robin. Good morning, Dermot. Good morning, Betsy. I wanted to dig in a little bit on the AI commentary that you had, Robin. Starting off, the operating leverage is just so strong. Almost double what consensus had baked in for you and really terrific results here. I wanted to understand your comments on AI as it relates to the forward look because you indicated that nearly all your employees are using the Eliza AI platform. You're beginning to see the benefit of this. I mean, is it the benefit from AI at a level that we can see in these operating leverage results? And maybe you could help us understand, is this more revenues or expenses? Sure. Thanks for your comments about positive operating leverages. Dermot and I have both said over time, Betsy, that that is a great North Star. Going back to Glenn's question at the end there, one of the reasons why we've been always a little reluctant to guide on all of the elements underneath the hood of positive operating leverage is we recognize the composition, and any quarter or any year could be a little different. We do not want to create ceilings for ourselves. We are extremely hungry for positive operating leverage, and we see a ton of pathway. When you go under the hood, one of the reasons why over the past three years we've really focused on showing you all the inputs to what we're doing is because we recognize that the timing of exactly when each of these strategies starts to really hit varies a little bit. We've got several things driving the positive operating leverage. We've got a commercial engine which is starting to now make a meaningful contribution. Output evidence, you can see it in the record sales quarters that we had in the first and second quarter. The platform's operating model, we knew there would be a longer lead time to that. We started work on it three years ago, and now it's starting to come into its own, but it's still very early days because only less than 10% of our people have been in the model for at least a year. As we indicated in our prepared remarks, we see the actual value really starting to shine through in the platform's operating model after we've had people in the model for about that period of time. That is still to come, a little bit of it now, most of it 2026, 2027, 2028, and beyond. The next layer is the heart of your question, which is AI. We view AI as a top-line story and an expense story because what we're really doing is we're unlocking capacity in the company. We want to then be able to use that capacity to do other higher-value things. That's why we've been encouraging all of our people to participate in AI because we view our AI solutions, which we put on page three, again, demonstrating the inputs today, and then we'll show you the outputs over time. We see those as being able to be very helpful, as to will be our digital employees, as essentially companions and leverage for our people to be able to go faster and create capacity for themselves that they can reinvest in doing new things, pushing forward with clients, more time in the day, all of the above. Our excitement about AI is a very medium to long-term excitement, but we've invested heavily early on in the psychology of it in the company so that we have AI for everyone, everywhere, for everything. That's really how we think about AI. It's early days. There's not a ton in the P&L right now, to your point, with net investment, but we are starting to see the early signs of what we think will be an acceleration 2026, 2027, 2028, 2029, beyond. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo Securities. Hi. No good deed goes unpunished. I know you talked about organic growth. You could make that one of your punchlines, Mike. I know you've trademarked the world's worst oligopoly, but that one you could put in trademark as well. And BNY, not your parents' bank. Look, I'm the first to say you've optimized much better than I had expected these last two years. You have these very high returns, but the organic growth, and you do it correctly, X markets, X currency, X deals, whether it's 2% or 3%, is still not great in the scheme of. The overall world. I know you want that growth to be better. I know you said you had record sales, but the growth is still the growth. It has not changed that much at an organic level. I know you guys have thought about this, but to the degree you sacrifice the high, very high returns to reinvest for better growth than what the company has had for the past 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, right? Where do you stand in that trade-off of maybe having lower returns or maybe not raising your return targets and reinvesting more for growth? Where should that organic growth be in your perfect world, the way you define it? Sure. Several things here, Mike. One of the reasons why we put that chart, the top right corner of page three, was to illustrate the fact that organic growth has been growing. I hear your point about three versus two, but three is still 50% more than two and significantly up from where it has been in the past. A few other points to note. Our growth in the past generally has been quite subject to markets. We are very happy to take advantage of constructive backdrops. As I answered in a prior question, we're trying to position the company to take advantage of more types of backdrops so that we can be less handed our results by the market conditions and more in charge of our own destiny. That is a very deliberate strategy, and we feel like we're making some progress on that. That is sort of the next observation. The next thing under the hood is, what are the prerequisites for the real type of organic growth that you are talking about that you have challenged us on, understandably and rightly so, over the course of the past two or three years? This is where we really feel like we have set the table for the future. To your point about how we think about investing versus harvesting, we have been very clear on this. We are taking a decade view of the transformation of BNY, and we are pleased where we are, close to three years in, but we are far from done because much of what we have done has actually been investing for the future, and we are in the very early stages of seeing that being harvested. We talked about the commercial model. We talked about the platform's operating model. We talked about AI, which is part of the growth story as well as it is on the expenses. Let me just come back to the key elements of what we've got. We've got a diversified set of platforms that is, yes, helping us to be more diversified in different environments, but it is also allowing us to better position to capitalize on these market trends and to generate alpha because it's less one business going to market by itself. It's more what's the synergy between the component parts. A client who custodies with us, who also does treasury clearing with us, who also does collateral management with us, is going to be able to get better outcomes over time because of the fact that all of those things can just be book entry for us within our ecosystem. That allows us to move to 24-hour. That allows us to think and embrace digital assets maybe in a different way than somebody else can. You are starting to see the early signs of these platforms coming together to show something where the sum is more than the individual parts. That is what our commercial model is actually about. We are investing in these micro innovations, the bigger things, the synergies between the platforms. We have positioned people behind this. We have positioned culture behind this, and we are organizing the company behind this. We think it is starting to show, but we absolutely agree with you that there should be a lot more gas in the tank here. Hey, Mike, I would add just a couple of more points as well. One is, you asked the question sometimes about negative pricing. We haven't seen it this quarter, which really kind of goes to the efficiency point about us being able to reduce our cost to serve, which is able to help us drive the organic growth because we're able to compete more effectively to win our share of business. That would be point number one. Point number two, to Robin's point about the commercial model, now we're in the early stages of a product model which is joining with the commercial model, and that's been led by Carolyn Weinberg, where she's able to see in between the seams of our various businesses to create new products that clients want. Lots of opportunity to come there. The third point I would make is when you look at the firm overall, and you have to think about the enterprise, it's a 37% pre-tax margin, diversified business model. When you look at IWM, which is now hovering around 19%, there is upside from here for the enterprise as we resume that path towards 25%, which is going to further fuel organic growth at the enterprise level. I guess just one more follow-up on the talk about acquisitions. I heard you. It can be a powerful tool if it makes sense. You're not going to do anything stupid. I hear you. As you broaden the art of what's possible, since you are talking about being a different type of, not your parents' BNY, because you are more diverse in terms of your offerings, what's the realm of possibilities for acquisition? Clearly, traditional trust businesses or sub-businesses are always possible, going back to the merger, the big merger. What other areas would you consider maybe buying? It is an important question, Mike. Again. Our primary focus is on driving the growth. There are really different pathways on this thing. Two or three years ago, we said there's absolutely no way that we're going to make any acquisitions. We sort of warmed up to the idea of capability buys, which is how I would frame Archer. That really does check the box of helping us to go faster, to de-risk because we could buy versus having to build ourselves. We're seeing the early signs of that output, great client feedback, the integration's been going well, new client wins as a result of it. I still think that that is the most likely path for us when it comes to M&A, helping us to go faster. I'm going to guess, but it doesn't have to be this way, that those types of things are generally more likely to be in the bits of the business which are a little bit more platform-like. Although it's interesting that Archer was a buy once, use across the firm type of acquisition. That's our expectation for the primary focus because the bar for larger transactions is super high. We'd have to have a lot of conviction in the execution of something like that because clearly they could be quite complicated. There you could make a case elsewhere in some of the other segments that maybe there would be the opportunity to have even more scale. Because if you're a scale player and you've got a platform's operating model-like organization, the thesis would be that you could bolt on more activity onto your existing chassis, and there would be a lot of scalability associated with that. That's a fine thesis and something that we certainly keep in mind as well. As now we have close to 2/3 of the company in platform-like businesses, either in MWS or in our issuer services business, and you look at MWS alone, it's a 49% margin. We've got choices in this space, but we're not going to let those choices get distracting for us. We are focused on building our company, to your favorite term, the organic way, and then we'll just be opportunistic and disciplined on external-related stuff. Message heard. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Thank you. Good morning for the question. Thank you. Busy morning. I had a couple of questions for you guys around the new business opportunities. I know you mentioned a couple of things around the digital assets and just kind of tokenized environment, which obviously continues to be quite dynamic. I was hoping you could build on that a little more. Obviously, there's a lot of debates in the financial services industry today, perhaps more so on this topic than in the past, in terms of what's a risk versus what's an opportunity. When you think about where BNY sits in that realm, where do you see both risk to the existing businesses and some of the new revenue opportunities that could come out of this? Sure. Thanks, Alex. Net-net, we see these advancements providing more opportunities than risks. You are right, there are things on both sides of the ledger. If you just go back and think about industries and big changes in technology that happen over time, they create disruption. What disruption does is it allows for a little bit of a reorganization sometimes of the ecosystem. It is our observation that companies that have a lot of forward-thinking innovation, that push forward, that take advantage of that as opposed to sticking their heads in the sand, tend to be winners. Now, we have many specific valuable attributes that help make us a great partner to these digital assets firms. That is one of the reasons why we have been so engaged in this space for several years, because initially, it had been about providing our traditional banking services to those digital asset companies. We serve many of them with our traditional banking services. It has been about helping with the on-ramps, off-ramps between that traditional banking world and the on-chain world. In the future, we think it is also going to be about more activity on-chain. We are live with Bitcoin custody today. We do it natively, and we can help clients. There is more stuff in the world. We are in the business of looking after stuff as one of our businesses, and we are happy to do that. We are also in the payments business. Again, there is synergy between our platforms. We are also in the issuer services corporate trustee business. There is synergy. We are in the NAV business. That is relevant. Synergy. Distribution business. Relevant. Money Market Fund business. Relevant. When you take all of these things together, we're a terrific partner for some of these clients because we can do a lot of different things with a trusted brand that actually helps them to feel good. Stablecoins particularly, it's obviously one of the topics of the day, and we're very active in that space. That's the reason why we mentioned a couple of those recent examples, but there are many more in our prepared remarks. Alex, what I would say is that's all great stuff, but don't lose sight of our core businesses that are market-leading, that are growing share because the market is growing. Growing the pie with existing clients in our core businesses is also happening and very important. Yep. That's all fair. Dermot, one for you on just the balance sheet dynamic and deposits. I know you mentioned you guys do not lead with deposits. That all makes sense. When we look at the trajectory for the deposit base over the last couple of quarters, obviously much more stable and nice to see the non-interest bearing deposits improving here as well. As you look out into the back half and ultimately where we are in July, maybe give us a sense where non-interest deposits in particular sit. As we think about the forward, which businesses tend to drive those for you guys as we sort of think about the trajectory beyond 2025? It was a strong quarter. I expect the balances to moderate into Q3. You might remember Q3 of last year was a strong quarter for us in terms of NII. Q3 is a tough comp. Deposits, we expect to moderate the seasonal slowdown. The diversity of the NIB across the franchise is particularly pleasing, but corporate trust is a highlight. Because of the breadth and the depth and the market shares that we have in that business, we do attract a lot of cash into the system by virtue of increased client activity. Corporate trust in Q2 was a notable highlight, particularly around escrows as a result of increased M&A activity. I would expect that to moderate a little bit in Q3 and pick up again in Q4. Overall, I feel pretty convicted around the high mid-single digits NII growth for the year. All righty. Thank you so much. As a reminder, if you'd like to join the Q&A, press star one on your telephone keypad now. We'll take our next question from Brian Vidal with Deutsche Bank. Oh, great. Thanks. Good morning, folks. Maybe two separate questions on the platform's operating model. First one, maybe for you, Dermot. Focusing on the cost reduction element. As we have another 50% to migrate over the next, call it, 12 months. I know, obviously, expense guidance went up a little bit, which makes complete sense given the stronger revenue growth environment and also the dynamic budgeting aspect that you've talked about. On the cost reduction side from that conversion on the platform's operating model, how should we think about framing that as a positive contributor to the expense story for the rest of this year in 2026? I do go back to a little bit, Brian, what Robin said earlier about 50% of the people are in the model. We've done three waves over the last 15 months. The maturity level between wave one and wave three is quite stark. What the wave one businesses that went into the model are doing now in terms of BNY connectivity, automation, dynamic innovation, having an entrepreneurial spirit within their own businesses. It gives me a great sense of pride to actually see it day in, day out. While your question led with the cost reduction, we really think about it internally, about running the company better and creating capacity. We either deploy that capacity into new investments, new opportunities, or we let it flow through to positive operating leverage. You can see in Q2 of this year, we kind of gave the market 500 basis points of positive operating leverage, and the platform operating model was a contributor to that. With 50% of. The firm in the model and 10% in about 15 months, I would expect the maturity of this to kind of give us a benefit for the next few years. It is not for another two years where I would say the firm will be reasonably mature in the model. It is creating its own flywheel of momentum and innovation. When you overlay that with the maturity of the commercial model and you overlay that again with what Carolyn is doing on the product side, you are going to see the North Star of positive operating leverage be delivered for the foreseeable future. It is all about running the company better, and I do not talk internally about expenses or cost reduction. Yeah. Okay. That is great. Maybe just also on a following question on the platform's operating model. As you think about M&A. Maybe just your thoughts around. How much the operating model, the platform's operating model, kind of informs your decision about what type of M&A to do. Is it a major or a primary factor in bringing on businesses that you think can fit into that model and therefore you can scale them in organically? I guess, is it even possible to do large-scale M&A and integrate that into this platform, or do you see too many disparities with other large providers that would make that difficult? Yeah. It's an important question. Look, broadly on the platform's operating model, Dermot touched on the fact that it's a two-sided thing because we're very much looking for it to drive revenue. This interlock between platform's operating model and the commercial model is super important because by having defined our products and client platforms in the way that we have, and then by layering over that a new go-to-market approach with our commercial model, that's just allowing us to go faster, collaborate more across the platforms, create more solutions, and really create a lot of empowerment to our teams to go and listen to clients, invent new stuff, provide more solutions to them. Of course, that and just running the company better more broadly, as Dermot mentioned, those are the reasons why we are doing this. Now, it has a nice byproduct, which is it organizes ourselves in a way where our chassis is super well-organized and very strong. We clearly see the benefits of that across the board as we continue to go through the model. I think what that will result in is when we talk about some type of bolt-on acquisition, and almost irrespective of its size, if it's sort of adding to us in something that we broadly do today or something that essentially speeds us forward in something that we do today, we're able to add it without really having to take on all of the expenses associated with us because it sort of becomes a bolt-on to a chassis that we have. You could see that with Archer as a good example, which is they are able to do more of what they want to do because they're able to tap into the right additional parts of BNY. The client onboarding capabilities that our client onboarding platform provides to Archer in its acquisition of new clients allows them to go faster. The fact that we've been able to wrap our technology and our AI around that is going to allow them to do more things. There is a real economy; you're able to actually achieve an economy of scale and actually add scale to a scale business or go faster in a business where you're adding a capability, whereas sometimes that's a theoretical conversation because you look at something and you say, "Oh, well, you could just—you're pretty scaled. You could just add more stuff and it'll scale." That is not true if you're adding a complicated back end and you're not trying to smash two incompatible things together. I think that was a lesson that this company learned 20 years ago with the acquisition or the merger between Mellon and BNY. That was not consolidated properly. The punchline is the platform's operating model allows us to have a clarity of chassis that I think actually will allow for higher quality integrations in the future if ever we choose to do one. Yeah. That's great, Cowler. Thank you. We'll take our next question from David Smith with Truist Securities. Good morning. You're pretty clear that you see further upside on returns and margin from here, even with the strong results you've had in this quarter and the first half. Are there areas right now that you feel like you're over-earning, or would you say that you're looking to hold or improve profitability across the firm from these levels right now? I would say it's a good question, David. How I would answer that is we're trying to get better every day in every business. A mindset I adopt with everybody that I work with and talk to is 1% improvement every day. Be better. Run the company better. Always be humble. It is all about the client. If you keep the client happy, you are going to win more business. That really is, I think, our secret sauce. I talked to a couple of people this week who have been at the firm a long time, and I said, "What is the difference between BNY today and BNY 10 years ago?" In a word, it was about client centricity. We are very focused on putting the client at the heart of everything that we do. I would not say that any one business we feel like we have reached max potential because we have invested in a lot. If you kind of take corporate trust two or three years ago, that was a high-performing business from a margin standpoint but had been neglected for a long time with respect to investments because the margin was good. Now we have kind of decided to invest in the business, and we're growing share. We're doing it at a higher margin than we did before. We're using AI. We have better employee NPS scores. All in around, the strategy is working when you look at the three strategic pillars for that particular business. If you looked at it objectively three years ago, you would say nothing to do there. We felt like there was a lot to do, and we're making great progress. David, let me add a couple of things because your question is one of these things that we debate quite a bit internally as a team, and it goes back actually to the very earliest days of us re-underwriting our strategy. At the time, you might remember us saying this, we looked back over the industry, for instance, on annual operating leverage, and we say, "What does great look like? What are the two best performers in the prior decade from 2012 - 2022 on positive operating leverage, and what actually is that number?" The answer was, well, it was 150 basis points of positive operating leverage on average over the course of that decade. We said, "Okay. We think we can be best in class. We think we've got the businesses to do it. Let's shoot for that." Lo and behold, we've sort of blown that out of the water in 2023 and 2024 and also in the first half of 2025. It begged the question to ourselves about, are we over-earning? How does the environment fit into this? We realized, of course, we keep talking about being a platform's operating company. We have these great set of businesses. We do not actually think that banks are our pure comp. We think that there is also a comp out there with other platforms companies and other financial services platforms companies who do not happen to exist in bank form. When you start to look at the world through those lenses, suddenly, ROTCE, you can see a pathway to bigger numbers, and you can see a pathway to bigger numbers on margin. We look at those types of comps, and we say, "Okay. Let us not be satisfied with what we originally thought of as maybe the way that we think about positive operating leverage. It's okay to push harder." Having said that, we constantly want to be able to invest. To Dermot's point, we're not going to let a pursuit of positive operating leverage cause us somehow to under-invest in the business. We are investing with a decade view first and foremost. I think it does go to one of the earlier questions and your point also about are there ceilings. I'm sure there will be, but we're not allowing ourselves, including not being lulled into a sense of security by achieving our medium-term outlooks and targets, we're not allowing ourselves to think about any ceilings across the business. Just to push you a little bit on that, if you're not putting any ceilings or capping yourself on expenses in order to achieve positive operating leverage, why not invest a little bit more than just 3% expense growth given the strong backdrop you're seeing and strong performance you've shown so far the first half? It's a good push, and we do challenge ourselves on that question. I think if you were in our sort of weekly syncs on these types of topics internally, you'd hear Dermot on a regular basis going out to the various different businesses and platforms and say, "Tell me what you need to invest. Do you need more investment and more expense allocation in order to be able to help you to go faster?" That is a constant push that we are giving to the businesses. Now, having said that. We are mindful of the fact that some of what we do is also dictated by the environment, maybe less and less over time, but it clearly is still a meaningful backdrop for us. We are naturally a little bit conservative in terms of how we think about the year going into it because if, for instance, we had a much, much tougher backdrop, which would not have been impossible in the quarter when you think about what was happening in April. All of the sort of uncertainties that were in April, we would not have felt comfortable necessarily if we had a more negative environment growing our expense guide. There is a certain amount of agility as opposed to going into the year assuming everything is going to be perfect, betting on a big expense number, and then getting disappointed. That is the old version of BNY Mellon. That's not the BNY of today. Financial discipline is a very important skill and muscle memory that we've developed over the last few years, and we'd like to think that. You have given us some credibility for that. It's not our desire to lose that. Financial discipline is very important to us. All right. Thank you. Thanks, David. Our final question comes from the line of Rajiv Bhatia with Morningstar. Your line is now open. Great. Good morning. Yeah. Just want to follow up on your remark that you're not seeing negative pricing. Should I interpret that as pricing being flat year over year? Is that on a consolidated basis? Are you seeing the pricing environment differ by LOB? It's broadly flat across the firm and significantly improved from three years ago where I would say it was a headwind a few years ago. I think as a result of all the strategies and initiatives that we talked to you about and that we've talked about today. I would say repricing, if I was to give you a stat, is roughly down about 80% from where it was three years ago. Overall, at the enterprise level, it's flat to slightly positive this year so far. Does it differ by LOB? Not really. No. There's no standout really by LOB. I would say it's broadly consistent. Thank you. With that, that does conclude our question and answer session for today. I would now like to hand the call back over to Robin for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you, operator. Thanks, everybody, for your time today. We appreciate your interest in BNY. If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to Marius and the IR team. Be well and enjoy the rest of the summer. Thank you. This does conclude today's conference and webcast. A replay of this conference call and webcast will be available on the BNY Investor Relations website at 2:00 P.M. Eastern Time today. Have a great day.