The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (NYSE:BK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dermot McDonogh: So, I will give you two dimensions to that answer, Glenn. One is, we have a portfolio of businesses that attract both interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing deposits. Corporate Trusts, Treasury Services, Asset Servicing, Clearance and Collateral management being the primary ones. They all have different characteristics about them and they do things in slightly different ways so it kind of gives you a portfolio effect so that you feel like you have a diversified deposit platform. I think that’s important point number one. Important point number two is, how we manage and price the deposits. If you came to BNY Mellon three years ago, you would have all of those deposits in different lines of business. They would have all handled their clients separately, they would have all priced their deposits separately, and you would have ended up with suboptimal outcomes when you aggregate that up from the BNY Mellon’s standpoint.

Now we’ve got global liquidity solutions, it’s one team, interfaces with each of the line of the businesses, but we price consistently, we manage consistently, and we have a pipeline that we think of as one firm. I think you add all that together, you get the one BNY Mellon effect, you get the strategy effect, and you get the line of business effect. And that gives us confidence that we have a good handle on our deposit franchise and where we want to be from here.

Glenn Schorr: Thank you, that was the bow I was looking for.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Rajiv Bhatia with Morningstar. Please go ahead.

Rajiv Bhatia: Great. Good morning. So just following up on the deposit conversations. I mean, by my calculations, your deposit data rose quite a bit in the quarter. I guess, can you comment on what your US dollar versus non-US dollar deposit data were in the quarter? And then how do your deposit data differ across your lines of businesses, such as asset servicing, issuers servicing, purchasing, and payments?

Dermot McDonogh: So thanks for the question. I guess 75% of our book is dollars, roughly 10% euro, roughly 10% sterling, and the rest other. As it relates to betas, I kind of think about it in cumulative beta terms. The cumulative beta of our dollar book is around 80%, which I think I said earlier, and that hasn’t materially changed quarter-over-quarter. Sterling and Euros are about 50%, 60% respectively, give or take a little bit. And so, we kind of feel as it relates to passing on the pricing, the clients that we have are sophisticated, largely passed on the prices as they come through. And it may grind a little bit higher from here, but overall we feel pretty good about where the book is, where it’s priced. You may see some modest catch-ups and lags here or there, but overall we think it’s where it should be given what’s happened in the market.

Rajiv Bhatia: Great. And then like your deposit beta is by like lines of business?

Dermot McDonogh: I don’t have that level of detail with me, so we can follow up with you offline.

Rajiv Bhatia: Alright, great. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jim Mitchell with Seaport Global. Please go ahead.

James Mitchell: Hey, good morning. Just a question. You guys have had a lot of success in improving the organic growth and things like pursuing collateral management. But investment management has been sort of left out of that discussion. Long-term flows outside of liability management have been negative last year. So do you see an organic growth opportunity there? Are you investing in that business and how do you improve that organic growth from here?

Robin Vince: Thanks for the question, Jim. Look, we said on a couple of calls ago that, where the margin of that business is at the moment, we feel we have work to do, we’re not happy with it. There are a bunch of things that have happened last year that are feeding into this year that have caused a kind of remixing by our clients out of active strategies into passive, which are lower fee paying, out of equities into fixed income. So there’s rebalancing going on under the hood and we’re kind of attacking it in a number of different ways. One being kind of getting after structural expense inefficiencies, and we’ve talked a lot about that today, and this segment is no different to that, so we’re attacking it there. We’re rolling out new products, and that’s going to take time to build AUM, but do that in a first-class way.

We kind of think organic growth will come on the back of that. Inside of BNY Mellon, we have a very kind of powerful distribution platform, So we’re very focused on kind of really energizing the distribution platform to support our kind of boutique asset managers. And we’ve made some leadership changes there this year, and we’re going to begin to see the fruits of that in the coming quarters. So we’re kind of going after it in a number of different ways. And some of the asset management boutiques are performing very well and we’re very happy with them and some of them have work to do and we’re very focused on it and we’re not sitting idle wishing it to happen. We’re active in trying to make it happen.

James Mitchell: All right. That’s it for me. Thanks.

Operator: And our final question comes from the line of Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Mike Mayo: Hi. Just as a follow-up, you’ve been giving a lot of optimism. I know you have to execute, but you said you’re paying the cost curve. NII should do pretty well with the way you’re positioning for rates. You’re investing for growth. You’re shooting for positive operating leverage next year, so it all sounds pretty good. When you think about the risk to the company over the next year, what are the main risks that come to mind that you think you need to pay a little extra attention to whether it’s macro or micro?