Northern Trust Corporation (NASDAQ:NTRS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Three, investment governance – there are areas around the company where we’re investing in growth for the business, we’re investing to get deeper and stronger, but we’ve got to accomplish those things but at the same time test whether or not we still want to be investing at the same rate, at the same timing. Then lastly, fourth is a big pillar is workforce analysis, and a couple things there. You already see us getting at larger severance than we normally take, and that should get to 300, 400 positions that will be impacted. That’s why we’re focused on driving productivity across operations, and then a step earlier than this, we took out hundreds of technology-related contractors in fourth quarter, just as an indication of how aggressively we’re getting at this internally, and that’s a big effort to do that.

But again, we accomplished a lot and now it’s time to turn the corner on it.

Michael O’Grady: Yes, and Brennan, I would just add, I think Jason described it well, but think about it as bottoms-up and top-down, right, which is each of the groups, as Jason was saying, they have to have their productivity initiatives that work their way up to their productivity goals that are in the plan. The top-down part is the productivity office, which is doing things that can cut across the enterprise and also have the structure to work with the groups to help them meet those productivity initiatives. That’s the approach to it, and again this is–we always have productivity as a part of the planning process, but as Jason is saying, when you have inflation like we do, you have to be able to ramp up those activities in order to get greater efficiencies.

Brennan Hawken: Sure, sure, and everybody is dealing with inflation and it’s certainly troubling and it’s weighing on the results for that question. That was a lot of color and I appreciate that color, Jason and Mike. I would encourage you please to provide some actual metrics, though, to the investment community so that we can measure your progress, understand what your goals are, and actually have some visibility in order to think about where you’re going and what you’re trying to do, not just from a conceptual perspective but from a numbers perspective, because I think that would really help in improving the confidence. One follow-up question would be on wholesale funding. I just took a look – you know, wholesale funding was up again this quarter.

Should we think about it getting back to the 2019 levels where it was, like, mid-6% of the funding side of the balance sheet? Is that reasonable, because it still looks like there’s a little ways to go to get there, or is this the upper end of the range and are you trying to limit that growth?

Jason Tyler: There’s not–there’s nothing strategic that we’ve been doing in that area to bring it down, and so it is instructive as you’re doing to look back at more historical levels. It’s not to say that’s the target, but it is to say that where we are right now is not reflective of any strategy that we have for lower levels.

Brennan Hawken: Okay, all right. Thanks for the color.

Operator: Thank you very much. We’ll take our next question from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

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