Good morning. It's still morning? Yes. For those of you joining us via webcast, I'm Susan Katzke. cover the large cap banks at Credit Suisse. Next up for the banks is State Street, as we switch gears into the land of the trust banks now. I'm pleased to be joined by State Street Vice Chairman and CFO, Eric Aboaf. Eileen is here with us from Investor Relations as well. We've had a productive morning thus far. We've got a lot of ground to cover, new ground in this session. We're gonna do this as a fireside chat. Don't hesitate to raise your hand if you have questions along the way. I will do my best to work those in. You have a question? I have a disclaimer. Please. Courtesy of our legal team. Just to remind everyone, before we get started, today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, and you know that actual results may differ materially from those statements due to any number of important factors, including the risk factors in our 10-K and our SEC filings. Our forward-looking statements speak only as of today. We may not update them, even if our views change. With that, over to you, Susan. You did that very well. Thanks. Let's get started. I think, you know, we're gonna start at the same place I've started with everybody this morning, and that's on the macro. Just given how dynamic the environment has been, I think it's helpful to start by level setting against your view of the macro rates and the markets kind of a month post-earnings. If you wanna start with your view of whether we're gonna see macro slowing or the path of interest rates, you pick your spot. It's really tough to call. I think what I'd share with you is we're prepared for a range of scenarios. As you know, in January, we gave an outlook because we felt like some point estimate would be helpful. You know, we assumed point-to-point equity markets would be up 10%. That's still down on average year-on-year. We seem to be moving in that direction. A lot of anxiety or optimism, depending on what side of the trade you're on right now around whether the Fed's gonna hike a little more, whether they're gonna hike and pause, whether they're gonna hike, pause and cut. I think we'll see, you know, maybe that's trending up a little bit. Some of the international central banks, a little less aggressive maybe. I think it's too early to change our views that in general, equity markets will, typically, drift up, rates will, move up. I think the real question is just how far, how fast, and what happens next. Okay. Well, on the markets, I have to tell you that the guidance being predicated on 10% up markets, I thought that was a little bit aggressive. Now, as I told you, I think we're gonna put you to work as an investor, as you've been quite correct on that. I assume you feel pretty okay with that expectation at this point, given where we are now in mid-February. I feel better than I did when I said it. Okay. Okay. We'll leave it at that. I do have a full-time job. Okay ... as a CFO, not as an investor, and I think I'm gonna stick to it. I think so. Okay. Let's go to the balance sheet, and we'll let you do your CFO job. We're gonna talk about NII resilience, and we're gonna get to your guidance. Let's just start with the fact that the trust banks were early to experience beta and mix shifting in the deposit base, and I think that's quite natural given your customer base. We're gonna start there and dig in around deposit flows, beta, the NII guide. If we look at H.8 data in total, you see industry-wide deposits in decline, but your business is global, so I know we don't wanna focus on the H.8 data alone. Why don't you tell us what you're seeing in the last few weeks in terms of the flows and the mix shifting? The last, the last few weeks, you know, the first, which is really the, like, the first 6 weeks of the quarter have been in line with our expectations. I think to just rewind the tape a little bit. Clearly during the, I'll call it the COVID experience, with the Fed intervention, we saw ballooning of deposits in the banking system that followed rate cuts and quantitative easing and so forth. Through the Q3 of last year, we saw that balloon kinda taper back down. We've been running deposits in the, you know, $210 billion-$215 billion range. We saw that relative stability into the Q4, and then we said this year we'd expect roughly the same. Part of that is just you've got client behavior under the surface playing out, right? Non-interest-bearing deposits tend to float down this time of the rate cycle. Interest-bearing deposit balances tend to float the other way. I think in aggregate, between just our the macroeconomic and monetary policy situation, which is quantitative tightening on one hand on the Fed's balance sheet, seemingly offset by some of the reduction in the Fed reverse repo operations, right? There's a bit of an offsetting effect. Continued quantitative, I don't know whether to call it openness. You know, continuation in international markets. We're seeing a, you know, decent amount of deposits out there. I don't think we're seeing the deposit growth that we'd normally see. Instead it's, we expect it to be relatively flattish. Part of that is that, as we engage with our clients, we don't only engage with them about what they might have in their particular deposit accounts. You know, as I said at earnings last month, we've got about $1 trillion of client cash that we help them with, right? Some of that's in deposits, some of that's in money market sweep. Some of that's in repo. Right? Some of that is in our asset management, you know, cash business. In fact, we're helping clients, and we're engaging with them about where's the best place to put their cash. They typically wanna array it in different areas, and that gives us a way to engage with them, find the right servicing, the right price points and so forth. That's made for a healthy and relatively stable deposit base at this point in the cycle. And you've touched on some of this now, but when you think about how your customers' behaviors have changed and how your business mix has changed to drive a different pacing around the mix and the flows and the beta relative to the, maybe not even the last, but two cycles back in terms of rate cycles, what's changed? I think the external environment has changed quite a bit, right? We know that, right? Last time, you know, over, what, a 3-year cycle, you know, rates moved up, what, 2.5 points. Now it's over a. Quick. In a third that time, they've moved twice as much, right? It's, you know, that's quite different. Last time we had no movement in rates in the international geographies of Node. Now we've actually seen sustained growth. I think the market is different, and clients are, you know, reacting to that and saying, "Hey, how do I manage my cash? How do I..." Literally that's the conversation we're having with them. What we've done over time is actually we've built a client coverage and client executive team that actually can engage with clients on that topic. That's actually helped bring us closer to our clients and give them more avenues. Right now we're continuing to see, you know, that rotation on interest-bearing to interest-bearing. we're continuing to see some amount of, hey, if I leave more deposits with you, will you pay me a little more on that amount? we don't mind separating, right? Laddering... deposits, so to speak. We've seen betas, you know, higher in this cycle than we did last time, but that's because we're further through the cycle. Yeah. in some ways. You know, in the U.S., for example, we've said that, you know, excluding some specific initiatives, you know, our client interest-bearing deposit betas in the 65% to 70% range, which is kinda what you'd expect at this point. Internationally, it's interesting. You know, there it ranges between 20% and 50% betas, probably because we're earlier in the cycle, probably because those markets tend to have, I think, a little more just stability in how prices evolve and balances evolve. In some ways, as a global bank, you know, we've seen the big part of the tailwind from the U.S. rate rises. We're still seeing some of the tailwind from the international rate rises. You know, we try to operate. We operate in all those geographies that matter where you're seeing those rates, whether it's pound sterling, Canadian dollars, Aussie dollars, euros, of course. That, in a way, is a way to monetize our balance sheet as rates continue to float up. Okay. Before we get to guidance, let's just touch on loan portfolio and securities portfolio growth and what your appetite is at present. Yeah. The way I describe is our portfolio, our investment portfolio to start there, is typically geared in size to the deposit base. Yeah. Right? Deposits go up, we leave more at the Fed or the central banks, and we invest more in the investment portfolio, and vice versa. You've seen that float up and float back down. I think we're relatively comfortable with the kinda general ZIP code that we're at. You know, over time, we get a tailwind from long rates, right? Even though we have an inverted curve, we got a tailwind from long rates because we're tractoring through as the old investments mature, we're reinvesting at a higher rate. That's constructive. I think what we're gonna continue to do is just monitor what we think is gonna happen with the belly of the curve in the long end and see is there a time that we'd wanna put a little more duration on. It doesn't feel quite yet, you know, but we're keeping an eye on it. If inflation expectations rise, and we see some steepening, could be an interesting point. For now we're kind of in the right zone of in terms of size of the investment portfolio average duration of, you know, two and a half years or so. Loans I think is actually a different category for us. That's where we're supporting our clients. You know, private equity capital call financing, fund financing, lines of credit. We do some real estate lending for our clients. We do some CLOs for our clients. Those are appealing, and to be honest, it's a very high-quality book. It's kinda very integrated with our business. As, as, you know, we look out, that's an area we wanna grow. Wanna grow the loan book, you know, high single digits, maybe a little more or a little less, depending on opportunities. That's a way to continue to take advantage of our balance sheet and add to NII and to earnings. Let's go to the guidance. I know it's only halfway through the quarter, I have to ask on NII if there's any change in your thinking. Your existing guidance, just so we're reminded, is that you were looking for NII to be flattish Q4 to first, and then kind of decline 1%-2% quarter-to-quarter in the second to fourth quarters. Nothing's really changed at this point. Okay. It's just, it's early. You know, we booked one month. It was in line with our expectations. We're a couple weeks in, and I think we'll just, you know, take it as it comes. For now, it's within the boundaries of what we've expected as we've looked at the figures, and, you know, we'll just continue to update as we go. Let's shift to I think a more fun, interesting topic and talk about new business. You had solid new business generation again in 2022, coming in over the $1.5 trillion target pace. How do you see 2023 shaping up? Really is there any change in terms of what your customers are looking for, or competitive dynamics or where you expect the new business to come from? I think I'd describe the business environment as continuing to be attractive for us. We continue to see the business momentum that you just highlighted. You know, last year we had $1.9 trillion of assets under custody wins in the core servicing business. The year before that it was, you know, north of $3.5 trillion. Now we're really focused on two things. One is about almost $3.5 trillion of that's in the backlog, right? It's kind of won and contracted, but not yet installed. There's a big focus on working with those clients to onboard it in stages across their product lines, their geographies. Then continuing to be active with our clients. I tell you, the pipeline's strong. Clients are certainly, you know, managing their franchises, but they're looking for places to grow on one hand, they're risk managing on the other. Finally, they continue to think about their economics. When they think about their economics, that's a natural time for them to talk to us about, you know, our Alpha proposition of front-to-back, of potentially consolidating business with us, or in some cases, new clients coming our way and say, "Hey, you guys at State Street have something a little bit different, you know, let's talk." I tell you, the business environment is positive. You know, we feel the momentum, you know, will continue at pace. Okay, let's dig in on Alpha a little bit. 12 existing, 2 new ones in the Q4. How do you think about your capacity to continue to take on new big Alpha mandates at this point? How are the installations going? What are you learning? How scalable is it? I think the capacity is flexible, right? As we win business, we have an ability to scale up implementation teams, internal resources, external resources. In fact, what's in some ways unique about the Alpha proposition is the clients also need to scale up too, right? Because they're adjusting their processes, they're adjusting in many cases, readjusting and changing their internal systems, right? Taking ours on and so forth. There's a fair amount of collaboration that has to work. I think we've learned a couple things as we have been down this path with the Alpha front to back proposition now for the last few years. I think one is that, it's a collaborative effort, and we need to get clients very much into the project management role, resourcing role, and so forth, because they make as many changes as we make. That's the first learning. I think secondly is it takes time. I think when we first sold the Alpha front to back proposition, you know, we had custody on the brain. Custody can get implemented in three months, four months, it's fast. Some of these Alpha propositions, because it's so transformative for our clients is 24 months, 36 months. It takes time. I think as we've now done and announced about 20 of these, implemented 12 as you've described, we've also realized that standardization really matters, right? Part of this is, I think we've refined the proposition over time. We've standardized more of it. We'll continue to standardize even more of it. That makes it both easier to implement, on one hand, which is kind of the existing pool. It helps us go to the next stage of clients and describe what we're gonna do in a way, as I've just described, where we've learned and made it even better. Finally, it lets us have confidence in the investments that we're making, because the more, we can scale those investments over more clients, the stronger it'll be. You know, as an example, you know, the heritage for Charles River, which is the tip of the spear on Alpha front to back, is that it came from an equity environment and moved into fixed income, right? Aladdin was the opposite. It came from a fixed income investment, moved to equities. We're now at the point where the releases in Charles River this year that we've invested in, we think will make it as strong or stronger in some cases on the fixed income side. That's the kind of investment we can scale across the platform. The more clients we bring in, the more we'll benefit from that, the more we'll be able to invest in the next round of feature functionality. That's how we're looking at it as a way to use Alpha as a growth engine for the company. I gather that the standardization helps from an economics standpoint to you. Also part of Alpha was that over time, these clients would actually do more and more with you, the goal was to be, I assume, in line with your target 30% pre-tax margin, if not net accretive to it. I think when we sat here last year, you spoke to the Alpha clients within 2 years being accretive to that target. Any update around the timeline or how those relationships are progressing and seasoning? No, that's right. We still expect the same amount of accretion and contribution to margin. I think what we've learned and refined over time is our view that, you know, in Core custody in the back office, we have very high margins, especially on an incremental basis because it's such a fixed cost structure. In middle office, we tend to have lower margins. Why? Because it's very manually intensive, right? You go back to how do we standardize really matters there. In the front office, Charles River space, it's quite accretive to margin. What we're refining over time is, hey, we need the right combination of the front, middle, and back with clients because we don't want just the lower margin pieces, right? Clients, to be honest, are economically rational. They don't want to just give us the highest margin pieces too. Right. There's a good collaboration now, but it's actually sharpened our go-to-market strategy, sharpened the kind of instructions that we give our client coverage and sales force and helped us make even better decisions. We're comfortable. I mean, part of what you've seen is you've seen us as a company raise margin by about a percentage point in each of the last three years Right? three years in a row of margin appreciation or expansion by about 1 point per year. ROE is up by about one point per year over the last three years. Part of that is I think we've gotten the right configuration of the Alpha proposition, on one hand, and then we've obviously, you know, been highly engaged on some of our productivity and standardization efforts on the other. Okay, we're gonna get to that in a minute. Okay. Before we go there, any new or different opportunities in 2023, kind of even Alpha aside? I think the way I'd describe the growth opportunities ahead of us, which are quite appealing, is that there's a range, right? I think on one hand, there is private markets, right, growing at low to mid double-digit teens, right? A very attractive area, growth areas where there's a lot of value we bring our clients as a kind of a real growth engine. That's one. Secondly, there's the Alpha proposition, which I think is particularly strong with asset managers, with some of the large asset owners who act as asset managers because of how they're configured and organized, and that's been very positive. Finally, I think the global and international dimension is particularly strong for us from a growth standpoint. You know, Asia's always been an area that's particularly strong in growth. We had a great year in 2022 in Asia. The Middle East and the sovereign wealth funds, particularly strong brand for State Street in that part of the world. Latin America, right, new offices in Chile. We just celebrated our fourth year anniversary of having a bank in Brazil, right. ... where we can now build a broader and broader set of propositions. I think it's really private markets, it's Alpha in its kinda, really intensely strong areas around asset managers, asset owners, and then the international is really the three areas that I spend my time on. With that, you know, we think over time, that gets us to that fee revenue growth, you know, target that we have about 4%-5% per year. Okay. Let's switch gears to expenses and operating efficiency. You've taken some new restructuring charges, and what I wanna do is get into a little bit more of the detail of what you're focused on now in terms of driving the incremental efficiency. You know, how much... what do we watch to actually validate the process that you've undertaken in- Some of that in the line items that we disclose. That's kind of one vantage point I'd describe. Another vantage point is we've continued to be real clear in some of our disclosures around how much are we saving and how much are we investing. I think that's a way to keep us honest on one hand. On On the other hand, to monitor our progress, we're trying to report against that. I say it that way is because you can look at expense growth of a couple% and say, "Is that good or not good?" The truth is under the surface, right? Are you investing enough to actually grow the franchise? Are you saving enough to fund those investments? I think if you look at some of the reporting that we've done, you know, in 2021, we had more than $300 million of gross saves. In 2022, I think it was around, it was north of another $300 million. We'll continue to report out on that. In fact, even when we gave outlook, we describe what are we investing and what are we saving to fund that. I think those kind of give you a cogent, kind of, total sense. I think there's one more vantage point where I spend a lot of time with my business partners and some of our finance staff, which is what else are we gonna measure? How do you measure automation in a complicated business like ours, right? It's not just straight-through processing. That's too conceptual and too high level. It's down when we process derivatives, when we process corporate actions. How automated is that work stream? We're down at that level. We also monitor in how many places do we perform a certain function. Fund accounting, recons. Do we do it in X or X minus, you know, number of places? 'Cause, you know, like running factories, you don't wanna run dozens of factories, you want to scale factories. You don't want run one factory because you need some distribution. You need to be able to load balance work. We've continued to find ways to kind of narrow the locational configuration of some of our activities. It's really, I think it's locational configuration, then automation deep down at the process level that matters, and that's the place we're spending time. You know, we've thought over time how to share that with you. It's hard to do it because you kind of go from investment services down to 20, 30, 50, 100 processes, but it's down at that level that you have to engage, and I think where our teams are. you know, that's where we see opportunities, 'cause as you know, we were the amalgamation of lift outs and bolt-ons and acquisitions over the last 3 years. So there's still room to continue to simplify and automate as we go. I guess it for the moment, it's gonna come down to your level of confidence in getting and holding that 30% pre-tax margin. That's right. That's right. If you can figure out more numbers along the way to share with us, we'll take them. Okay. Okay. I have a to-do. Let's talk about for a minute strategic positioning post BBH, no BBH. At least we don't have to debate whether that is going to close or not anymore. Post BBH, you had a scale opportunity that isn't here, and then there were certain technologies you were excited about acquiring with that business. What changes, and are there means to otherwise amass that scale, that global presence, and that technology? Let me describe it this way because the Brown Brothers investment services potential acquisition at the time was in a way a bolt-on, right? We have $37 trillion of assets under custody. It came with about $5 trillion. Right. Interestingly, if you think about the six quarters that we spent, trying to do the deal and then finally deciding it wasn't feasible. During those six quarters, we won $four trillion of assets under custody administration, right? Almost the size of that acquisition. I tell you've gotta have it in context. Right? That's a very fair perspective. We're a scale business. Scale matters. Where we can amass scale, we will. We do it through the normal course of business. In a way, you know, Brown Brothers is a way to accelerate that a little bit. From time to time, if we can really find an accretive deal that has good payback for shareholders, yeah, we'll look. By and large, our strategy, as we've described, is continued organic growth. Part of it is goes back to some of the growth areas we talked about earlier. You know, we have an Alpha from the back proposition that no one else has that we can lead with. We've got a real footprint in privates, with this international footprint and geographies that are really positive. I'd say there's, you know, organic strategy is strong. It's, we continue to win new business. The momentum is there. To the extent that, you know, we had seen some geographic areas or seen some technology that we like, most of those were on the roadmap, so to speak. They're on the roadmap of build, they're on the roadmap of expand, they're on roadmap of add, coverage too. We'll be able to do that, we'll be able to continue to do that, as originally planned. That's in the expense base and in the expectation. That's right. On asset management, I think for a while our attention was somewhat diverted around the strategic agenda for asset management. It's still, it's a big business. It contributes to that 4%-5% fee revenue growth aspiration. I assume you're really not gonna answer me, but when you look at that business and your confidence that it is as scaled and complete as it needs to be for the next decade, are you a buyer? Are you a seller? What... Are we just keep organically marching down the path? I think first and foremost, we're very happy to continue to drive the organic growth trajectory of that business. It's one with, as you say, three and a half trillion dollars of assets under management. Not very many are at that size and scale and global footprint. You know, we've got three strong businesses within that. The ETF business, the cash liquidity business, and a large institutional business that's very global in nature. You've seen we've had good flows over the last few years. Good top-line growth, some of that driven by some tailwind of equity markets over the last few years, some of it by the flows that we've been able to generate. Margins have expanded in that business. I think we're quite pleased. I think what we're working on now is just how do you continue to do that? What are the next areas of expansion? I think those are all part of the existing strategy. You know, we'll always take a look on the side to see if there's, you know, something that you could bolt on that's accretive, that's valuable. It's not the core of what we do, right? Sure. The core is just to continue the growth trajectory that we're on, and then to build from there. Let's switch gears to capital management. I think people were quite happy to see the $4.5 billion share repurchase authorization. Maybe let's start there and any update around the pacing of your buybacks. Let's take that also into keeping in mind CCAR, and we're gonna talk about how you interpreted this year's scenarios and your new exercise. Yeah. I mean, I'd say, you know, we're very happy to announce the share buyback, the four and a half billion USD. Part of it is very consciously, we diluted our investors, you know, more than a year ago, a year and a half ago, and we've gotta get that back, that capital back to them. Then during the last year and a half, we've also been accreting capital, and that's that rightfully is owed to our shareholders. So we're excited about getting that get it back to them at pace. At pace being kind of $four and a half billion divided by four per quarter? Not to be so specific, but How front-loaded could you expect to be? Yeah. The way I've described this is a little more qualitative, that we'd like to do it at pace. I've said, you know, as my mother said, "There's no time like the present. Okay. It's hard to though, do it all at once, right? There's some stock exchange rules. To be honest, I think we, our investors want us to get back to them and float down into our target capital ratio ranges, right? We're trying to get back down into that 10%-11%. I think a little more of it comes towards the beginning, but we'd also don't wanna, you know, a stair step, suddenly be, you know, be in the market one day, bump against stock exchange rules and then not buy back the next day. It'll be a little more towards the front end of the year, but over the year. Okay. How is your appetite influenced? I know I was surprised that when the CCAR scenarios came out, they had a new exercise for you because I know you needed more on your to-do list. The exploratory market shock doesn't factor into your capital requirements this year, but how do you interpret this new exercise? I mean, as we've listened to Vice Chair Barr and the other Fed governors, they've been clear that they wanna continue a range of stress tests. To be honest, you know, one single stress test, you know, isn't enough, right? We as a GSIB do many stress tests during the year. We do many different ones. That's part of the regulatory construct, but it's also part of our risk management process. And we'll continue to do that. I think they're being explicit in showing a range as well. I think to be honest, we'd rather they, you know, show a range and we can learn with them than, you know, than something happens at the eleventh hour. I thought it was quite constructive that they decided to say, "Hey, what if we did another global market shock?" From our standpoint, the GSIBs, for the six largest GSIBs, right, the universal banks, they take the global market shock and run both their trading book through it and their single largest counterparty, right? Correct. For us and the other custody bank, it's just focused on the single largest custody, single largest counterparty. Correct. That's the part that in the instructions, they were explicit that they'd like State Street to run. You know, we can do that easily. We have the tools set up to do that, and it's the kind of thing that we do anyway. They were also quite clear in the instructions. We did re-read them, they're worth a look, that they're not expecting us to do anything else other than the single largest counterparty test. This is just another version of what we've been doing. We'll obviously go through the process and, you know, take it from there. Considering that and the Basel III, Basel IV end game and how this plays out, is your expectation that your capital requirement drifts upwards or the CET1 requirement in particular? I think if you take those apart, I think CCAR, from a CCAR standpoint and SCB standpoint, we don't see much change. That's pretty straightforward. We just always get different tests. The loss content is so low. Hmm? The loss content in your business in a stress period is just, it's very low. Correct. Right? We're an asset-light, a capital-light business. That's kinda, you know, aligned with how our balance sheet's constructed. There's no real changes either from our standpoint or from the CCAR process. I think the Basel III end game is different. I mean, we'll see. That's gonna affect all the banks, the GSIBs, the large regionals, the small banks. It's gonna affect us probably in somewhat different ways, right? The Fed's working on their notice of proposed rulemaking, and we'll see. I think the early look on that from a couple years back, so the information is stale, is that it'll tend to require more capital in the banking system. I think the question is how much? A little more? A modest amount more? You know, we're all pretty well capitalized right now, but, you know, they're... We'll obviously conform to what comes through. If it's a little bit more or somewhat more, in what areas, right? There'll be the obvious question, well, can you adjust for some of that? Can you adapt your business mix, right? Because some of it is about the signals the Fed is trying to send to us, right? What business is higher risk, lower risk. Other is just about the quantum. Right. Part of what we're gonna try to digest as we see the next round of the Basel III rules is, you know, what's being signaled, can we adapt or not, and then how does it affect folks? I think our sense is, you know, it'll affect all the banks. We'll be inclusive of us, but we just need to kinda see what gets described. It does seem like a process that's gonna take some amount of time. I think the last we had understood is some notice of proposed rulemaking this spring, perhaps, but the implementation date is some of our, you know, products and services, which is a bit how, you know, banks have adapted in the past. If we put that to the side, just in wrapping up here with the 1 minute and 20 seconds we have left, how when you think about kind of the next one to three years, how will you define success for State Street? Probably in three ways. I'd say, continue to show growth and an acceleration of growth. The business momentum that we've started to show, I think is important, and we wanna accelerate and drive that trajectory forward. We also wanna continue our productivity and reinvestment programs, because the more we can save, the more we can reinvest and differentiate our offerings with our clients and drive that growth. Finally, the continued capital return. We're a capital-light business, and so there should always be a large buyback, maybe a larger than usual this year, but there should always be a large buyback for our shareholders. I think what that does is it drives us to begin to deliver on our medium-term targets. Right. Which was around revenue growth, margin, ROE, and capital return. I think we're on that trajectory. You know, the last few years have been strong from a growth standpoint, and then particularly strong from a margin and ROE standpoint. We feel like we can continue that trajectory. Okay. Well, we'll look for more of the same in 2023. Thank you for joining us once again. Thank you.