Fireside chat with State Street Corporation. As most folks know, State Street has about $353 billion in total assets. The assets under custody the company are close to $47 trillion. Assets under management are $4.7 trillion. Its market cap, and we've priced this before this week's pricing action, is approximately $28.6 billion. With us today, we have Mark Keating, who's the Interim CFO for State Street. He's to my immediate right. Mark's been with the company since 1990 and has held a number of different positions within State Street. To his right is Yie-Hsin Hung. She's the President and CEO of State Street Global Advisors, and she joined State Street back at the end of 2022 and has been critical and important in reorganizing the State Street Global Advisors. Before we get started, I do want to just read a disclosure statement for State Street, which is their legal disclaimer, which says, "Just to remind the audience that today's discussion may contain some forward-looking statements and that State Street's actual results may differ materially from those statements due to a variety of important factors, including the risk factors in State Street's Form 10-K and other SEC filings. State Street's forward-looking statements speak only as of today and may not be updated even if the views change." With that, Yie-Hsin Hung, take it away. Thank you very much. We really appreciate your having us. Before I get into the presentation, maybe a little bit of background on me. I'm the CEO of State Street Global Advisors, and I joined the firm just over two years ago, having come from New York Life Investments, where my team and I grew the business four-fold through a combination of strong organic growth and acquisitions outside the U.S. and in alternatives. And I'm really excited to be here today to talk about SSGA, the tremendous growth and progress we've seen over the course of the last two years, really executing on our very clear strategy, which is to become the world's leading partner and provider of innovative investment exposures and tailored solutions for our clients. So before I get into that, perhaps we can turn to slide two, and I can give you a high-level sense of SSGA in total. So today, we're the fourth-largest global asset manager in the world. We cater to a broad range of institutional as well as wealth intermediary clients. Importantly, we're the third-largest index manager in the world. We're growing very quickly with our SPDR ETF business that's ranked number three. And we also are gaining a lot of market share in the U.S. defined contribution space, where we've moved from number seven to number four over the last five years. So not only do we deliver a capital-light, high-margin, fee-based revenue stream for State Street, we also generate a lot of revenue synergies across the company. So for example, at SSGA, we're an alpha client of State Street's. We're also one of the largest investment servicing clients of the firm. And then we partner pretty closely with the markets division, where we manage their cash collateral, and we also contribute about $1.4 trillion of our assets to their securities finance and agency securities lending activities. One of the first priorities I had coming in as CEO was to embark on a very focused growth agenda. And my talented team has been really engaged with that and executing on that plan for the better half of the last two years. And as you can see on slide three, we have some very tangible proof points of the early success we're seeing in executing our strategy. So whether it's our revenues over the last two years, the revenue contribution SSGA is making to State Street's overall revenues, or our assets under management, they have grown meaningfully over the last two years. Now, of course, the markets have been supportive, but importantly, we've been investing in our business starting in 2023, and that has contributed a great deal to the very steep organic growth trajectory you see at the bottom right-hand part of this slide, where we closed out 2024 with an organic growth rate of 3.5%. It's the second consecutive year we've delivered north of 3%. And this is at the same time, on a year-over-year basis, we've generated about 500 basis points of fee operating leverage. So what's enabling this? It's really three key main drivers. The first is that we are being much more competitive in how we're going about business and the way we're pricing our index and our ETF range, and particularly with our ETFs, we have devoted in each of the last two years 1% of our ETF revenues to selectively, strategically reduce the fees that our clients and investors are paying, such that in 2024, we raised a near record, I mean, a record of nearly $50 billion in net flows into our SPDR low-cost portfolio range, which has really meant for buy-and-hold investors, and it also means today that we have the absolute lowest cost ETF exposure to the S&P 500 at two basis points, so the second key driver is that we're moving with deliberate intent and much greater speed. You'll see that we've ramped up our innovation engine. We launched more products in 2024 than we have in the last three years combined. We also brought together what we had were two groups that were really calling on clients. We had a group that sold ETFs solely to wealth intermediaries, and then we had another team, which really represented everything else we do, to the institutional markets. Today, we have a single global client coverage team. And as you can imagine, the amount of cross-selling synergies we see are immense. And then we've also been able to attract some really talented senior individuals into our organization, such that today, more than half of my direct, immediate leadership team is comprised of people that are either new to the firm or new to their roles. And then the third key driver is that we're investing meaningfully into where we see growth in the marketplace and where we have significant size and the ability to take advantage of real tailwinds. And coupled with that, we have been busy entering into strategic partnerships to help us deliver innovative products to the marketplace quicker or to extend our distribution reach on a much bigger way. So if you look at slide four, you'll see where we think there's growth and where we have an outsized opportunity to win. It's with ETFs. It's in markets outside the U.S. It's across wealth management channels, and it's in fixed income as an asset class where we've seen this move from active to passive that we've been witnessing in equities for a very long time. Each of these markets are large and growing quickly on the right-hand side, but we too are large and growing quickly, in large part because this is where we are focusing our investments and devoting our resources. And it's not just at the asset level that you see this very strong growth. If you double-click down to the next slide, where we provide you a view into our net new assets over the last two years by product, a lot of inflows going into ETFs, 75% of our flows. This is really demonstrating that ETFs have quickly gotten adoption not only in the U.S., but around the world. By region, we're really well positioned to take advantage of continued growth outside the U.S. As you can see here, we still are dominated by the U.S., but the amount of assets that we're gathering from non-U.S. Clients is actually 10 points higher than the composition of our assets today. And we're really well positioned because we have 28 offices around the world. We manage money in 11 of those, including our most recent addition in Riyadh last year. By distribution channel, very well balanced. Wealth represents a majority. But again, this is significant because our institutional to wealth breakdown of our assets is closer to 70/30. So you can see the benefit of our focusing on this high-growth segment. And then by asset class, we're pretty well diversified, and you might say fixed income looks relatively small. But at the same time, if you look under the covers, you'll see that our index fixed income book is really growing rapidly. It reflects the fact that we are the second largest fixed income index manager in the U.S. Importantly, I talked about our organic growth across the business being 3% plus over the last two years. Each of these segments that we're focused on, whether it's non-U.S. markets or fixed income, they've delivered mid-single digits organic growth. Wealth and in ETFs, it's high single digits. Very exciting, I think, from an organic growth perspective, but we're also leaning in on partnerships. If you look at this next slide, six, if there is one key aspect I would love for you to take away today is just how attractive we are as a partner. We actively try not to compete with our clients. We're not looking to get into the wealth management space. While we're really big and we have the benefits of size and scale, we don't do everything. By way of example, our active strategies only represent 6% of our overall revenues. What this does is allow us to partner with other best-in-class asset managers, whether it's Apollo for private credit or Bridgewater for liquid alts or Galaxy for the digital asset ecosystem. We bring tremendous expertise in ETFs, and we're able to launch really interesting, innovative exposures for clients. And this is all the while we're being supported by the number one ETF servicing platform in the world at State Street. We're also investing in maturing fintech firms where their business model is very much aligned and augments ours. I mentioned our growing market share in defined contribution. It's probably no surprise, and we issued a press release today talking about additional clients coming into our IncomeWise guaranteed retirement income target date fund solution. And there, Micruity plays a real important role. This is a firm that makes it really easy for participants to decide how much to allocate to in-plan annuities. Now, we also invest in wealth management firms, very substantial ones, as well as what we consider next-generation wealth platforms. It allows us to extend our reach to new investors, a broader set of investors. At the same time, it gives us a meaningful presence with our products and our model portfolios on those platforms. So PensionBee is a U.K.-based firm for individuals that may have changed jobs a couple of times, either in the U.K., have stranded assets, pension assets, or in the U.S., same thing, 401(k) assets, makes it easy to combine those into portfolios that are comprised of our ETFs. Envestnet, I think many of you know, went private at the end of last year. We're one of four asset management investors on that platform, also one of four preferred providers on this largest turnkey asset management platform focused on wealth advisors and independent broker dealers. And Raiz Invest really targets any size investor and makes it easy for them to get access to investment products like ours. And then interesting, this last one, Fideuram is a wealth manager. And what we're finding through our size and scale is another use case where we can deliver ETFs as a service. And so they wanted to launch their own branded ETFs. We enable them to do that incredibly fast by subsidizing those ETFs and then lending the expertise and the capital markets provision that we do for ourselves. We think all of these help us accelerate our growth initiatives, and you should see more of this from us in the future. So in conclusion, on slide seven, what you have in SSGA is a world-class, powerful global asset management franchise that is deliberately aligned to the growing segments of our industry, whether that's index ETFs, fixed income, even money markets today outside the U.S. and in wealth. We're really well positioned to deliver a wide range of investment exposures and tailored solutions to our clients. Number two, we're really delivering results, and it's the clear execution of our strategy to be the leading partner and provider of innovative exposures and tailored solutions. And we're doing that in a way that is contributing multiple economic streams to State Street. And then lastly, everything that we're doing today is about growth, whether it is competing more aggressively, innovating, leaning into growth segments of the market, partnering with other firms. We're very focused on delivering for some of the largest institutions around the world that we're fortunate enough to consider our clients. At the same time, we are building on our legacy established more than 30 years ago of democratizing investing and access to everyday investors. So with that, concludes sort of my formal remarks about SSGA, but Mark and I are more than happy to take any questions you might have. Great. Well done. Thank you very much. Maybe, Yie-Hsin, to start with you, a broad question. When you think about the actions that you've taken since you've joined State Street in 2022, your presentation hinted at the one State Street approach. Can you talk a little more about what you're doing at SSGA to deliver the synergies or interconnectedness with other State Street areas? Sure. That's a great question. So I talked about in my presentation the benefits of SSGA being inside of State Street. What I didn't really talk about was the client opportunity. And so many of the clients that we consider ours are in the asset owner arena, whether that's sovereign wealth funds or pension plans or insurance companies. This is the very same segment that investment servicing and the global markets division caters to. And I would say historically, we each focus on what we deliver to those clients and what has really changed. And it reflects some of the changes in new leaders in different positions is that we're starting to really think about this value proposition. And from the perspective of our clients, we have a wide range of things that we offer. And so, thinking about that in a bundled way, understanding what's really important to them, how can we shape that sort of complete offering. And we're early days, but I would say we're all incredibly excited and enthused about what the opportunity is as we move forward with that. And is it hard? And not that there were silos, but is it hard to incentivize people to do this coordination? Or how challenging is it to get that coordination up and running? Well, I think so much of it, as I alluded to, is really sort of the tone at the top. Yes. Right? It starts there. And at the end of the day, you know we do have some level of education that we have to provide so that everybody across the organization is just as facile talking about what they do as well as other parts of the firm. And really being smart about what kinds of questions to be asking clients so they understand what is the next opportunity. I think incentivization is part of it, but as you know, it's not all of it. Right? It's really this sort of commitment to doing this. And then as we see good results, which we are, I think that just begets more. Yep. Absolutely. Maybe another follow-up question to your comments. You've talked about the partnerships, and Ron has talked about these as well. And so when you look at it within the wealth space, what are some of the opportunities, again, for SSGA and State Street in the wealth-specific space? I think it makes a lot of sense for State Street really to increasingly focus their wealth services effort in that segment because, as we all know, it's growing rapidly. In the U.S. alone, I think it's about $35 trillion. So it's the largest customer segment in the world. And there's so much that we do in the institutional side of the business, whether it's servicing, reporting, custody, you name it, the whole chain. I think so much of that can be leveraged. And within CRD today, they have a very decent-sized book that's focused on delivering CRD for wealth. And then you heard me talk about where a good 30% of our assets we manage for wealth advisors, RIAs, broker dealers around the world. And so we have tremendous relationships with all of those potential clients. And so it's an effort that is really exciting for everybody across State Street because there's a role for all of us to play in bringing all the pieces that we have just together to focus on this segment. Very good. Mark, a broader question on State Street overall. What are your thoughts on the current operating environment? I know it's only a couple of months into the quarter, but compared to the macro assumptions you guys laid out for us on the earnings call in January. Yeah, thanks, Gerard. I mean, it's certainly been a dynamic and interesting start to the year, the first couple of months, and then obviously even the last few days. Yep. So, you know, but on balance and appreciating the significant variability in some of this, I'd say as we close the books on February, which I have to just remind ourselves, it was only on Friday that we actually closed the month of February, you know, our overall macro assumptions underlying our outlook were broadly in line. Yep. Okay. So, I mean, again, there's some pluses and minuses and some puts and takes there, which I can go through. So, if you recall, we went into the year expecting global equity markets to be up about 5% point to point, which implies about 8% on average on the full year. And when we closed the books on Friday, that was the general zip code that we were operating in. Now, from a puts and takes point of view, the U.S. markets actually had performed worse than what we had expected going into the year, and the non-U.S. markets were actually been performing stronger than what we expected. But on a net-net basis, it's been pretty neutral to our base case. And of course, we're all seeing a considerable amount of volatility driven by geopolitical headlines over the last few days, shifting economic data and sentiment. So we'll have to continue to monitor markets and see how the averages develop from here as we go forward. Turning to interest rates, it's much the same story. The outlook for policy rates continues to move around as well. But again, broadly in line at the end of February to what we expected. The only caveat there would be the Bank of England actually accelerated its rate cutting. And as we talked about back in January, you know, that in and of itself is a slight headwind to us for 2025. We had expected using the forward curves at the end of the year to see roughly two rate cuts at the Fed, five at the ECB, and three at the Bank of England. I mentioned the acceleration at the Bank of England. You know, the shape of the curve is roughly the same. There's some variability at the Fed and the ECB, but none of that really changes the outlook as we see it overall. We've also seen notably lower long-end rates. I think on a quarter-to-date basis, it's down roughly 30-40 basis points. So we're cognizant that the rate environment's going to continue to move and forward curves are going to move around as we get through the year. But, you know, stepping back from all of that, you know, the operating environment continues to evolve, but I'd say that the first two months of the year are broadly in line with what we expected. We'll have to see how the rest of March plays out. And as we go through the year, we'll continue to evolve, assess our overall macro assumptions, and adjust as necessary. Yep. Following up on this operating environment, the larger banks that have investment banking and markets trading activity would tell you volatility is good for markets, for the trading, not so good for investment banking, and it's kind of been slow. In your world of custody and asset management, does volatility help or hurt when you guys think back over the years of running State Street? I mean, there is a, what I would call a bit of a natural hedge in our business. Obviously, if markets go down, it's not great for our asset servicing business. It's not great for our asset management business, but, as you alluded to, our FX trading business, our securities finance business, you know, can do, depending on the circumstances, can do quite well. And in previous eras, times of stress and strain, we have definitely seen that. Yep. Okay. Good. You know, with that as a backdrop in the operating environment, Mark, any updates to the 2025 guidance and thoughts about the first quarter? Yeah. Thanks again, Gerard. Yeah. Listen, while it's still early, you know, based on what we've seen over the first two months of the year, we feel good about the outlook we provided back in January. I'd remind you, as we provided that, that was on an excluding notable items basis. Right. So we're continuing to target both positive fee operating leverage for the year and positive total operating leverage for the year. I would remind people, as I did back in January, that to provide positive total operating leverage is going to require that NII does not become a material headwind for us this year. Right. So that is dependent upon global monetary policy, deposit levels, and mix, which, as we've talked about before, can be difficult to predict. Sure. Just as a reminder, we expect for 2025, you know, fee revenues to be up roughly 3%-5%. We expect NII to be roughly flat year over year in a range of plus or minus low single digits. We remain, you know, committed to, you know, good expense discipline, and we're targeting a contained expense growth rate of roughly 2%-3% for the year. So, you know, while we're continuing to monitor the economic environment or the macro environment I mentioned before, our 2025 outlook is intact. Yep. And just in turning maybe to Q1, I can give you a little bit of color on that. You know, again, on an ex-notables basis, although we still have one month to go, we do have a sense for how the quarter is beginning to shape up. And I would say that overall, we expect total revenues to be up nicely versus the quarter a year ago. We expect to deliver positive fee operating leverage and positive total operating leverage. I would remind you, given our strong Q4, where we did have some seasonal NII, higher NII due to seasonal deposit balances, and also some fee revenue elevation in areas like software, which can be lumpy. You know, we do expect right now to see a sequential decline in total revenue from Q4 to Q1, but that was all accounted for in our full year guide. Right. I'd also remind folks that Q1, we always see a seasonal usual compensation number hit. Our Q1 numbers also all included and accounted for in our full year guide. I would then maybe make one comment on kind of a housekeeping cleanup, which is folks would note that we issued a modest amount of prefs in Q1. And while there's no incremental cost in Q 1, we do expect that our pref dividend cost will step up in Q2 to roughly $63 million and then should moderate back down to roughly $58 million on a quarterly basis run rate kind of after that. So again, you know, to summarize, you know, while it's early in the year, we have a month to go in the first quarter. But based on what we've seen in the first two months of the year, our full year outlook is unchanged. Yep. Coming back to the net interest income, can you remind us of two things? One, which yield curve or what's more important, the U.S. Federal Reserve monetary policy versus the Bank of England or Europe when it comes to your business? And then second, if you had your druthers, what's the ideal interest rate environment to drive that net interest income higher? Yeah. So I would say we're more sensitive to non-U.S. rates than we are to U.S. rates to kind of answer that. And then, yeah, the ideal scenario for us is a longer, higher long-end rates, lower, I mean, sorry, higher for longer short-term rates, elevated deposit levels, especially non-interest-bearing deposits, as we've talked about in the past, and then really being able to leverage our balance sheet to help our clients grow. That's the ideal environment. Right. Great. Yie-Hsin, coming back to SSGA, you mentioned about the organic growth that you folks have seen for the last couple of years, about a little over 3%, well above the 2% kind of guidance that we heard back in 2024. What gives you confidence that you're going to be able to sustain that kind of growth in AUM going forward? Yeah, I think it's really, it comes down to some of the things that I talked about, you know, having brought our client coverage teams together, the number of new products that we launched, which was well in excess of 90 last year, and you know, the growth in the segments that I really spoke to. We see ETFs and these digital platforms continuing to grow, this ETFs as a service. Now, all of this is, of course, you know, as Mark just talked about, if the markets remain reasonably constructive. That said, you know, I think one of the most important things we can do in our business is really continue to diversify it. Right. Right b ecause, you know, different asset classes will perform differently in different environments and being mindful of that. And so some of our growth areas actually are diversifiers also for us, whether it's fixed income or non-U.S. markets. Those really make a difference, wealth versus institutional. And, you know, what we're seeing so far this year is obviously, you know, I think there's a sense of uncertainty clearly in the market. And, you know, a lot of movement, gold has performed particularly well. So we're seeing flows go into that asset class, into the short end of the treasury market, into our money market areas. And fixed income still seems to have some interest. And I think the view is for us, as long as we've got the full suite of capabilities in regards to the economic environment, there's, you know, reason to be engaging with SSGA. You mentioned 90 new products last year, did you say? How long does it take for them, for you guys to figure out that, wow, we've got some real winners and it's kind of under, does it take a couple of years? And how important is having new products every year to contribute to this growth? It really depends on the underlying strategy. So if we're talking about an active strategy, you're going to need to have a longer time horizon so that investors feel comfortable about that track record. So that could be as long as three years' time. Now, there's clearly investors out there that are willing to buy newer products before that track record. But at the same time, you know, it's very important, I think, in terms of developing sort of first mover advantage. Newer ideas, they get, they tend to get the lion's share. I think it really does vary in terms of what is considered like the right time frame to consider a success. But in general, if an ETF can get north of $1 billion, we would say that's pretty successful. Yep. And is there any geographies that you target with newer products versus, you know, established markets like the United States? We are looking across the board. I mean, there are clearly some strategies that have demand around the world. And so we'll have to think about what are the right wrappers for the U.S. market versus the non-U.S. market. But we're also complementing that with what do we see investors interested in and in our different regions that we do business. And so that also drives the agenda. Well, we've hit the red zone, which means we're out of time. So I want to thank both of you for joining us. It's been very insightful. And please join me in a round of applause thanking the people from State.