Robin Vince: So Mike, without reflecting on the past in terms of what people have done and how they’ve done it, I’ll just say that we acknowledge that the past decade has been disappointing in terms of our company’s broad financial performance. You can look at some spots on the top line, the bottom line expenses, we pick your spot, but we’re not comfortable with the broad performance of the company over the past decade. And that’s how we’ve talked to our Board about it, that’s how we talk to our employees about it, and we’re determined to change that. And so you’re hearing from us, I think, I hope, a determination around changing that outcome. Now to your question, let me take the two parts of the things that you’ve really talked about.
So first of all, the notable items. And so we are very, very clear, and we do this in our earnings release and we do it in our prepared remarks, we talk GAAP first. So you can see the reported numbers and it’s very clear and you can judge us on that but we also want to give you the transparency, and frankly, the insight into the way that we’re running the company under the hood. And we think that’s why that additional element of disclosure is helpful, but you’ll make your judgment based on that transparency and the insights that we’re trying to provide. Now I own that 4% to 4.5% number, 4%, if use the exit rate of currency, 4.5% on a constant currency basis, and that’s essentially half of what it was in 2022. And the environment — from an inflation point of view, isn’t expected to get any better.
We had inflation over the course of the past few months, CPI between 6 and change and 9 and change, we’ve still got that environment. But we’ve been very deliberate in terms of staffing, choices of things that we’re going to do, choices of how we’re going to do it. I talked to my prepared remarks about a variety of — involving our employees in bending the cost curve, because I think it’s a cultural thing for us as well. We’re attacking it on all of those fronts. Now once we’ve done all of those things to the implied question of what do we think the future holds, well, we don’t want to stop there. We don’t have line of sight to all of the things that we’re going to do in the future, but we see opportunities. For instance, I’m just going to pick one and then I’ll finish, which is on technology.
We’ve invested a ton rightly so, in resiliency as a company. Resiliency is incredibly important to our products and services. It’s wrapped up in our brand and we wanted to make sure that we really took ourselves to a better place than where we were five years ago, but now we’ve largely done that. It’s a continuous journey. We always have to do stuff. But the next leg for us is investing in things like the applications, the digitization of our footprint. We’re the world’s largest custodian but we’ve got more than one custody system. We’ve got multiple loan systems. We’ve got five different call centers and so we’re going in and seeing all of these opportunities. And then over time, we’ll do the work to resolve the issues. But we can’t do it all at once because otherwise, we’d spike on the expense base in order to solve the problems, and we only have finite bandwidth.
So we’re working through it and we’ll continue to work through it.
