Conference Transcript - BNY 2026-11-09

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining. I'm Brandon Hawken. I'm head of diversified research here, diversified financials research here at BMO Capital Markets. And I'm really happy that you're all here. Very, very pleased to welcome Dermot McDonough. Dermot is the CFO of Bank of New York, now known as BNY, rebranded. And really, BNY has been on a remarkable run. You know, you came in, you were part of the new management team, and the regular question that I get from investors is, BNY's been so great. The stock is rather expensive for good reasons, especially versus its history. Can this keep going? And by the way, that started happening like two years ago, and the multiple has done nothing but go up, which is what I typically remind them. I said, we had the same conversation six months ago. We had the same conversation 12 months ago. So to me, it's not a reason not to own a stock. The reason is the momentum behind the actual business. You get back to fundamentals. You get back to earnings revisions, which have all been great. I totally disregarded my written preface, by the way. Just checking. So when you think about what you and Robin have achieved, right, it's been really pretty remarkable. And, you know, that's the issue that's fundamentally challenging to me. And so... The pre-tax margin manifestation is what really manifests all of this, and so with investment and wealth management segment, that's the only one that's still below your guys' target, how long do you think we need to get that full-year margin to above the 25% that's your target for that business, and are there any lessons learned from the other segments that you can apply for that business?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Okay, so for those of you who are dialed in, even the birds are interested in this session. There's one flying around the room. You said a couple of things there in your opening remarks that I would like to pick out. One is team. The other one is expensive. And then I'll get to your question. So it really is about the team. Robin took the reins as CEO on September 1 of 2022, and priority number one was assembling a team. And over the last four years, the team has changed and adapted. People have been promoted. People have moved from one area of the firm to another area of the firm. We broadened out the leadership team. And really, I would say, if we look back on the last four years and what are one of the pillars of success, it's really been about 46,000 people. Aligning to a vision and a strategy that Robin set out, and for those of you who are new to the stock and are kind of considering investing. I would recommend asking your AI agent to give you an executive summary of the last three years of shareholder letters, because you see the strategy, you see how it has been unfolding, and we believe our best years. are ahead of us. So I kind of respectfully push back on the expensive. It's all relative to the past, but may not be relative to the ambition of what we have for the company in the future. And so we're about building a scalable, diversified set of businesses that could withstand a wide variety of scenarios. And we feel like there is a lot of work to do to continue to achieve that strategy. And so we're very ambitious for the future and we're excited about what we have in front of us. As it relates to the specific point on IWM, I think in Q3 was a signpost. We don't think of quarters and years as means to an end of themselves. We're taking a long-term view. IWM had a 24% margin in the Q3. You saw green shoots. Newton and the fund performance within that active equity complex is above benchmark, having good returns. We're beginning to see inflows. I feel very good about Dreyfus, our cash management business. Even this morning with Insight, we've just been awarded a billion-pound mandate in the UK. So, Jose and the leadership team there is really beginning to crank through the work and beginning to get clients and AOM flows back in. It's taken longer than the other parts of the firm, and I would say the main reason for that is it was more siloed, more technologically distant from the rest of the firm, and it's probably, if I'm honest, it's taken us a little bit longer to get it closer to the firm, but again, $2 trillion asset manager, a broad set of businesses within that. Working through the expense opportunities within that business, but also working through the top line and what we can do for clients. We were traveling in Asia a couple of weeks ago, and you can see our distribution platform there is beginning to deliver successful outcomes for clients. And then also the cross-sell in terms of into our Wealth Solutions platform and our asset servicing platform, where we do zero today, or negligible, close to zero. And so the opportunity there is quite significant. So I'm cautiously optimistic, or as I say in other fora, I'm a risk-adjusted optimist. So I feel good about the forward for what Jose and the team are doing there.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah, got it. It's a little known fact, but I got out of college in 95. Dreyfus was my audit client, actually.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Okay.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Well, it just shows you we're still around.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

For the long term.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah, the lion.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

242 years in fighting.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

I was in the MetLife building, you know. Okay. So long-term efficiencies in the platform operating model. The platform operating model has actually been so successful that I have found that Competitors are beginning to imitate the term, even though I doubt they actually have implemented what you guys are doing. At this point, all the employees at BNY are on the platform, right? With the latest additions expected to mature in 27 and 28, it takes, I think you said 18 to 24 months. You spoke to shifting focus to multidisciplinary teams, integrating the solutions, coming to market faster. So is that the next leg of the journey? And what benefits have you seen from the teams that were earlier adopters to the platform operating model?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So, I guess you have to go back and understand what is the platform operating model. Some people think it's a piece of technology. Some people think it's a different way of working. Some people don't know what it is. So, really, if you're, think about it, right, if you're in Robin's shoes and you're laying out the strategy for the firm, you need... And you have the strategy, and you know what you want to achieve, then what are the foundational pillars that you need to achieve that ambition? And the platform operating model is one of those foundational pillars in terms of it's a mechanism by which we were able to desilo the firm, bring the firm closer together, eliminate duplicity, create accountability. Create capabilities that are common in one place and then drive the strategy and platform operating model we have. Client platforms, we have which deal with the clients of a particular business, so people there are just very, very focused on delivering successful outcomes and partnerships for clients. We have enterprise platforms, which are delivering capabilities to the client platform, so enterprise platforms can serve as more than one client platform, so therefore you're getting the benefits of scale and synergies and efficiencies, and you can see how to prioritize. So from a CFO's lens in terms of budgeting and planning, this is music, this is really good stuff because you can see it in a very transparent way. And then the last complexity I would wrinkle in there is we have practices which are basically communities of skills like an engineering practice, an operations practice, a cyber practice that kind of go across. So you kind of have that matrix of alignment, and then underpinning all that, you have metrics and transparency and information flows that tell us what's happening in the company. And so with that, and efficiency to me has a negative connotation, it means cost cutting, and we're not really about cost cutting, we're about getting value for money, investing our dollars wisely, getting higher ROI's for the investments we want to make, and then tracking the progress and the accountability so we're delivering good outcomes. So now that we're in the platform, fully 100% the firm is there. We're all speaking a common language. We all understand how it works, and so you can see, we did it in five waves over a period of years, so you can definitely see maturity between wave five, maturity between wave one, and each one in wave one is showing up in a different way. A lot of people in the use of AI now as well, everybody's talking about KYC and onboarding and et cetera, et cetera. That was one of our first waves, our whole KYC onboarding process. The difference between that platform now versus four years ago is the difference between night and day in terms of how we invest our money, how we service clients, how we develop talent, and how we're using AI to further that and accelerate it. And that platform is a real example of, I would say, entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship within inside the firm. It's really good, I have to say. And then the other one I would highlight to you is our loans platform, which was, again, the first one. As a bank, we do loans all over the firm. We do it in markets business. We do it in our wealth business. We do it in our asset servicing business. But they were all running their businesses separately, different tech stacks, different ways of doing it. It's now under one executive platform owner. He has the tech stack for the whole firm. He invests the dollars for the whole firm, and everybody knows how it works. So the visibility inside the firm as a result of this is quite incredible. And if you just think we just... We finished putting everybody in. And actually then the NPS scores are people's enjoyment being in the model. They're closer to the action. They see what's going on. They know what they're rooting for. They're North Star for the platform. In terms of culture and how our teams feel around the world as a result of being in the model, I think, again, the difference is night and day.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah, that's actually helpful to try to understand. And the lending example is really interesting. Yeah. So now you've got a commercial model. So in addition to being complicated to try to understand what the platform operating model is, now we have to internalize what a commercial model is. So we've got this intersection now. I do think I understand what you guys are trying to do and the idea here, but now all the employees are on the platform operating model. The focus is now to drive the top line. Can we talk about how that ultimately manifests? And you've spoken to 10% of the wins coming from new clients, so how does that compare to a year ago, and is there a goal you have when you want to drive that metric?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So, again, not to push back on you a little bit, but push back. Yeah, I don't think we are trying to do it. I think we are doing it. Give the verbiage. But we're humble about where we are on that journey. And we realize, again, that there is a ton of work to do, a ton of work has gone into why. What's happened over the last couple of years, but again, we have ambitions to be much better than where we are today. And if you take a step back just to go to the siloed nature of the company, and it's not a right or a wrong or a criticism of what happened before, we just want to do it in a different way going forward. And again, we always pay tribute to those who have gone before us because they gave us a great set of businesses, and we want to leave our kind of strategic imprint on the business in a way that creates enduring change for the company. And one of the analysis that we did was, we're not joined up as an organization in how we deliver the company in all of its businesses to clients. And a lot of clients were only buying from one line of business. They would be onboarding to that line of business. If you wanted to do another piece of business with another part of the firm, then you had to go through and show your passport again. So it was like you were dealing with two different companies, albeit under one umbrella. And so there was a lot of what you might call client friction in that process, both internally and externally. Clients were feeling the friction. Internally, people weren't joined up, and Robin made what I would say quite an important strategic decision to create the role of chief commercial officer, which is the first time BNY or Bank of New York has had that. And so she's kind of set about over the last three years, kind of again, assembling the team, rebranding into BNY has helped that. And just so we delivered a unified approach to clients, explain to clients what we have and how we can partner with them. And that's a very important word, how we can partner over a long period of time to deliver their needs and their solutions. And so again, over the last three years, I think through Q3, we've, you know, 15 consecutive quarters of year-over-year sales growth. Q1 and Q2 was, you know, were both record sales quarters, 10% new logos last year, again, roughly consistent with that this year. And if you, you know, to be cheeky about it, 242 years, you would think we've kind of knocked on the doors of most clients at some point in our history. But actually, we believe there's a lot more white space out there, A, to existing clients, and B, to new logos who are beginning to learn what B&Y can do for them. So, again, I would say. Really optimistic about what we can do in the future in this space over the medium and long-term.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah, the trivia fact around BNY is it was founded by Alexander Hamilton. Personally, one of my favorites in the Founding Fathers.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

And if you ever have, again, if you ever have an opportunity to visit our headquarters, there's a couple of fun facts there. One is we have all the ledgers. My favorite one is the clock. You know, it was Alexander Hamilton's clock. It was gifted by the family to us. It's in working order. It rings every hour on the hour. And then we have our SeaTalk Center, Cyber Technology Operations Center, which really shows how we run the firm today. 20% of the world's investable assets flowing through our pipes and it's all up there on the screen and how we manage it and then if you if you stroll into Robin's office he has a little sign there Alexander Hamilton is not coming back as because he said on the way off to the jewel he said don't do anything I'd like come back And so he's not coming back.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Unfortunately. Father time is still undefeated. So thinking about the other side of that 10%, right, for the 90% of wins that come from existing clients. Where are your penetration rates there? You've spoken to a 60% increase in clients buying three or more lines of business. This is actually really remarkable because, again, personally, covering BNY for a really long time, I think everybody always thought that you guys, that the opportunity was so much greater than what had been achieved before. You guys have really been able to do that. But where does that stand, the three or more lines of business? Where does that stand as a percentage of your customer base? And what are the benefits of that penetration? And, you know, I could see lower churn working out as one of them, right? Because it's lower churn in your customers, right? Customers that are using multiple lines of business, it's harder to replace you. Inherently, right? So therefore, lower churn in that business which is part of the rub with your core business. And so that's, I could see as one of them, but maybe what are some of the other ones?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Okay, so.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

A few questions, sorry.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Yeah, no, there were a few there. So I think important fact number one is, like we deal with a lot of the world's Thank you. Companies, and the median is only one product, right? So you can do a lot more with existing clients, and all of this just can't happen in a day or in a night, and the cost of changing within some of our business is quite high. It's not... Like you're doing a capital markets transaction and you can switch easily. You know, I don't like dealing with you anymore, so I'm going to sign an ISDA over here and start doing my derivatives over here. The friction of moving is high, so it's a positive and a negative. And the positive is, you know, you have durable recurring revenues that are there for a long period of time. And when you do multi-year deals, people are in you, and if you can service those well, then you have clients for life. The negative is the contracts don't come up that often because then you're in. And so it's not, I wouldn't say it's a negative, it's just the way, the nature of the business, there's always stuff happening, but the positive does outweigh the negative, I think, in that regard. Then if you kind of take the collection of our businesses, I won't be definitively precise on this, but say we have roughly eight specific businesses within our three segments. I think there's only one company that does business with all eight. Yeah? And so if you kind of think, how can I increase that? More companies doing more. So actually, the white space by product, by geography. It's quite important, and that's a big piece of work that we're doing now to actually do where our product gaps, where our geography gaps, where our talent gaps to really. We have a lot of market leading businesses. We are number one and number two in a lot of things at the macro level. But when you double click down by specific product or by specific region, we are not necessarily always number one or number two. So, and I know you have covered BNY for a long time and so a lot of people will have I'd like people just to kind of take a fresh look, because you're going to go, oh, wow. BNY, formerly known as Boney, you know, middle office, back office. If that's what you think you're investing in, that's not what BNY is anymore. And so that's really, really important. Two is, if you kind of go, oh, dear, there's been a big run-up in the stock over the last few years. We've missed it. The transformation is largely complete. Again, it's not a transformation. It's a reimagination. And we have a collection of diverse businesses, which we are reimagining for the future in a world of AI. And what better leader to have at the helm to do that than Robin Vince, who's also on the board of OpenAI. And so when you do the numbers on B&Y and assess the business, you have to look at it through a different lens, not the lens of the past.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Right. And often that's what I'll talk to clients about, is the fact that this is a totally different company. So the number one thing investors love to do is looking at the 10-year average of the P.E. And sometimes that can cause you to miss it.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Yeah. Look, the other thing I would say, just to fill in there a little bit, is a lot of analysts focus on organic growth as a metric. So if you look at 22, you know, it was negative 30 basis points. 23, it was largely flat, 24, I think it was 2%, 25 was 3%, and through the first six months of this year, 4.5%. About 9, we got through October 31, or 9, 9, 30. So, that's another indicator of... We have small micro changes underneath the hood of BNY that are delivering the reimagination for clients and for our people, because ultimately it comes back to the culture and the people, and if we have 46,000 colleagues around the world who are aligned to a strategy. They're going to satisfy the three pillars of be more for clients, run our company better, empower our culture. That's going to deliver happy clients, and happy clients tend to do more business. We had one particular client in Europe that we were working really hard with over the last three years, very digitally forward, started with one line of business, and when we actually got to the time of transacting with them, In a partnership kind of way. They ended up doing business with four different platforms. That wouldn't have happened three years ago.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

No way. One of the, as an analyst who's covered the space for a while, over a decade, one of the regular discussions is around pricing. And what's really interesting around BNY is that pricing pressure has gone from like a perennial headwind, effectively, to a borderline non-event. How are you able to change that conversation with your customers? What level of pricing aggression are you seeing from competitors?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So I think with all businesses, it's good. We like competition. Because it makes you better. Sure. Clients should have it. Clients should have choice. I agree with you. It was particularly, again, the pricing pressure was really talked about in the context of asset servicing.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Yeah.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So that's, look, it's our biggest business, I understand. But We have several other businesses where that wasn't the conversation we would have with the clients of those businesses. And so when, you know, again, asset servicing is a little bit of a microcosm of the reimagination that's happened at B&Y over the last four years. We've invested into the core. A lot of significant technology dollars have gone in there to kind of get back to basics, take the business back to the studs, as it were, and kind of how can we deliver better client service, better solutions, more streamlined processes to our clients, and then talent, and the team has changed, the infrastructure has changed, and clients are beginning to feel that experience. So, if you have a happy client and you're giving superior solutions and outcomes, the price isn't the point of contention. Because it's a 10-year partnership. You want to be fair, you want to do it competitively, but at the end of the day, clients are not treating us like vendors. They're treating us like partners. How can you help me with my strategy and my company over the next 10 years? And I would say that's a really important change. We're showing up to partner with clients to deliver their strategy over a long period of time. And when you're having that kind of C-suite discussion... Pricing becomes not the central point of the discussion.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

For those not familiar, servicing is basically core custody. It's a very commoditized business and so pricing becomes a lever.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Look, I said it on the earnings call, 50% of the mandates that we won in Q3 were all Thank you. Another part of the firm was also awarded part of the mandate, so asset servicing is really a storefront into the rest, and when you think about, to your first question, think of all the clients that Emily and the leadership team of asset servicing have, and what Jose in IWM can do for those clients, his $2 trillion of manufacturing capacity. Opportunity is quite significant. Right.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

For sure. I'm going to jump ahead a little bit because I don't want to sit down here on stage with you and not talk about digital assets because it's really... Maybe for both of us, but your early comment on digital asset space, you know, they've begun to bear fruit because you guys have talked about this for a while. How do you see digital asset scaling from a strategic differentiator into a meaningful recurring revenue contributor over the long term? What's the size of the digital asset platform at BNY? I regularly get this question because I think when investors ever think about, like, digitization, they always think about the downside to it. Right? Inherently. It's going to, you guys benefit from, this is saying it simply and it's probably incorrect, but it happens with me a lot. You make money on inefficiencies in the system, right? It takes time for a trade to settle. You hold the assets during that period, and that provides some benefit. So, therefore, inherently, when you digitize that process, that will wring some of those inefficiencies out. So, investors tend to focus on the downside, but I think they miss the possible upside. So, could you talk to us about how you're thinking about that process?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Again... We're not about inefficient, again, just to be precise.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

I described it incorrectly, I'm sure.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

That's okay. Digital assets have been around. Let's pick. Eight to ten years, it's kind of started to appear in the lexicon of financial services. Blockchain, DLT, digital assets, tokenized assets. Verbiage is used interchangeably and can mean different things to different people. And it has a stop-go start to it, depending on the regulatory environment. There's the technology, then there's crypto around. There are a lot of pieces under that puzzle. And so when we take a step back from it as a leadership team at BNY, I think we believe both can coexist. And the most important thing is to give clients choice. And so... To illustrate the example, I'll just break clients, let's say they break into two blocks, right, traditional and digitally native. And so if you're digitally native, we provide a lot of thought leadership and, to be blunt about it, GSIB-grade infrastructure. In terms of the traditional rails to digitally native clients. We saw this in the regional bank crisis in 23, where we were the porch in a storm for digital natives to place cash with us. They saw the safety of our balance sheet, etc, etc. And so, but then they want to partner with you to kind of unlock. How we're going to do digital assets in the future, so we have natives doing traditional stuff with us while we reimagine the future, and then you have traditionals who are like Hey, hey, BNY, what's all this digital asset stuff? Am I missing something? What should I do? You know, we still have people who send us faxes every day. You know what I mean? So we cover the whole spectrum of what people do. And so what we want to do is give people choice. And so, you know, Stablecoin, think of it as cash. Tokenized deposits. Deposits. Money market fund tokenized, money market funds. It's just how do you want to move it, store it. The thing is, co-exist, the market is moving towards always on, and we are delivering G-subgrade rails and infrastructure to meet the demands of clients who want that service. And so... Over time, you know, everybody talks about the disintermediation risk and the disruption risk. It's not clear to me that. What people think on the downside is going to happen because it hasn't been seen yet. And so we're preparing for the future, but at the end of the day, we're supporting clients and giving them the choice. And so we'll meet clients where they want to be. And so that's our strategy over the next several years. And so far, we believe it's working, and we have assembled a great team to provide strategy, thought leadership, and serve clients.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

I just want to clarify something to make sure I understand. So you talked about the fact that you've got digital native assets that come in into some of these traditional businesses. Is the profitability of those clients, does it look similar to other clients across the business, you know, or is there a degradation in profitability around some of these?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

There's no degradation.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Lovely. Lovely. Thank you. I just wanted to be clear. We're just about at between 5 and 10 minutes. I want to give a chance for the audience in case there's a question. I have plenty more. So it's total non-issue if there are none. Outstanding. Okay. Let's talk about market and wealth services growth. This is one of the most profitable businesses that you guys have. Net new assets saw a nice rebound. It's a big metric for these businesses. We saw it get back to the mid-single-digit annualized growth rates here in the third quarter. You had some headwinds from off-boarding in prior quarters, so I suggest that's in the rear view. I just want to confirm if that's fair. And then what are your expectations for growth in this business? Robin recently spoke to clients changing perceptions around Pershings as a provider versus BNY. Is that a point of competitive differentiation? What are some of the examples of popular other BNY products for those clients?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

Okay. Again, you're banging in three questions into one.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Fortunately, you got them ahead of time, so, you know.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So, market and wealth solutions, like, that is a segment, right? And in the segment, there are three businesses. You're talking about specifically wealth solutions purging within that, okay? The other two businesses are Global Payments and Trade and Clearance and Collateral Management, which are very big, meaningful, important businesses in that segment that, you know, if you look at Clearance and Collateral Management, $8.3 trillion on the platform. We settle the U.S. Treasury market every day. Just think about the flows that would have happened in the last four weeks in both of those things, given what's happening in the market. So it's important to understand the economic drivers that kind of lead up to our revenue. You know, you think Treasury. You think BNY, because every time a treasury is touched, or traded, or moved, it touches BNY, and so you just see a lot of flows with the dynamic operating environment that we're in at the moment. So switching to Wealth Solutions. For me known as Pershing. The artist formerly known as well. So look, four years ago when I started at BNY, if I went to Pershing or Well Solutions and, you know, we have a Jersey City office and a lot of people are based over there, and I asked, who do you work for? And they wouldn't say BNY. They would have said I work for Pershing. And so, again, that's just the way it evolved at that time. And Robin said about wanting to change that because it's better for the employee experience. And it's better for our clients, and so we can deliver more capabilities from BNY to the clients of that platform than we could previously. And so clients are now beginning to understand and are happier that they're interacting with a broader firm. I can access broader capabilities, whether it's clearing, whether it's a market's business, whether it's advice from another part of the firm. It's like, how do I tackle my AI? Because these are a lot of small companies who are grappling with... Like, the last time I was in Florida was Saspocalypse Week, and so that's February. So a lot's happened in the world since then. And so a lot of these mid-sized firms, like, how do I navigate this? So B&Y, I think, is a differentiator in that space. Like, we have over three, nearly $4 trillion on our platform, and so we're kind of a heavyweight in that industry with real ambition. And Adam Voss, who's just this year taken the reins of that business, and putting his imprint on it, which is another really, I would say, Micro thing that's going on under the hood of BNY in terms of leadership, mobility, fresh look, different perspective. Do things differently, shake it up, all with the outcome of how do we serve our clients better? And so we believe in our fundamental right to win in that business. It's good margin. As you say, we had a good quarter. Net new assets, I think, was up 9% year over year. We've previously guided mid-single-digit growth on net new assets. Absent, you know, we've had deconsolidation over the last couple of years, And that was largely as a result of M&A. And so I feel very optimistic about that and the reimagination that we're going to do in the months and years ahead.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

We've got a couple minutes left. Here we are in the middle of the quarter, so I'd be remiss not to ask this question. So what trends are you seeing so far in the quarter? You talked about just the last week and the level of volume. What impact does that have on your updated 2026 expectations? Obviously there's not a ton of time left in 2026, so hard to move the needle in a meaningful way, but what's the mark to market there?

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

So... Marius, who's our head of investor relations, sitting in the audience, we do a debrief with the firm after earnings, and we kind of reflect on how tough you guys were on us and what the outcome was. So, again, I think another, I feel very optimistic about BNY, and another signpost for that is on our earnings call.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

A few of these annoying questions you got.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

That was a tough call, actually, this time. 12,000 of our employees around the world dialed into the call. We have watch parties at BNY. And we kind of, people come for, you know, coffee, pastries, and we have people who kind of... Say, this is what this means. So we're bringing the firm along on the journey. And to me, that's a really powerful cultural message that everybody's on the train and we're moving along on the journey. And again, I think we were very pleased with last quarter. I think the market was pleased. But as we say, you know, these are just medium-term targets, are milestones, not endpoints. Quarters are milestones, not endpoints. There's a very, very strong leadership team, both at the executive committee level, the extended leadership level, the MD community. It's all about investing in the talent. Thank you. So I think internally, the trust, the collaboration, the strategic cohesion around the firm has never been stronger, and that showed up in Q3. And as Robin always says, we're taking a decade-long view. At some point, we're going to get close to that 10 years, so we'll have to start rolling it out a bit. Both. We're not in it for like, how do we deliver this quarter or this year? It's about how do we create a durable business model for clients that will withstand a variety of storms. And you have to kind of, if you reflect on the last four years, the only thing that's constant in our life at the moment is change. And my first earnings call was the regional bank crisis. And now we are where we are. This time four years ago, ChatGPT still hadn't been launched. And now we are where we are. And so, I think if the past is a predictor of the future. BNY, as a leadership, has successfully navigated those storms, and we're very ambitious about what we can do for our investors and our clients in the future.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Elegant non-answer. Thank you, Dermot. I appreciate it. Thanks.

Dermot McDonogh, CFO

All right.

Brandon Hawken, Analyst — BMO Capital Markets

Thanks a lot. I appreciate you coming down.