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Q1 2025 Bank of New York Mellon Corp Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Marius Merz; Head - Investor Relations; Bank of New York Mellon Corp

Robin Vince; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Bank of New York Mellon Corp

Dermot Mcdonogh; Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; Bank of New York Mellon Corp

Ken Usdin; Analyst; Autonomous Research LLP

Alex Blostein; Analyst; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC

Mike Mayo; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Ebrahim Poonawala; Analyst; BofA Securities, Inc.

David Smith; Analyst; Truist Securities, Inc.

Brian Bedell; Analyst; Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Steven Chubak; Analyst; Wolfe Research LLC

Betsy Graseck; Analyst; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Gerard Cassidy; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets LLC

Jim Mitchell; Analyst; Seaport Global Securities LLC

Presentation

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the 2025 first-quarter earnings conference call hosted by BNY. (Operator Instructions) Please note that this conference call and webcast will be recorded and will consist of copyrighted material. You may not record or rebroadcast these materials without BNY's consent.
I will now turn the call over to Marius Merz, BNY Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Marius Merz

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first-quarter earnings call. I'm joined by Robin Vince, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Dermot McDonogh, our Chief Financial Officer. As always, we will reference our quarterly update presentation, which can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website at bny.com.
I'll note that our remarks will contain forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Information about these statements and non-GAAP measures is available in the earnings press release, financial supplement, and quarterly update presentation, all of which can be found on the investor relations page of our website. Forward-looking statements made on this call speak only as of today, April 11, 2025, and will not be updated.
With that, I will turn it over to Robin.

Robin Vince

Thanks, Marius. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'd like to start with a few broader comments before Dermot takes you through the financial results for the quarter. Reflecting on the operating environment, while there were clear signs of optimism at the beginning of the year, we have now seen a rapid and significant reversal of sentiment, driven by uncertainty about trade and fiscal policies, which added to existing tail risks, including a variety of geopolitical tensions and conflicts.
Last week's tariff announcements were clearly part of a broader strategy and an effort to reset trade relations between the US and the rest of the world. This is an attempt at a very fundamental change. And while last week's announcements provided an initial baseline, we should expect that negotiations will take time, and it is likely that a clear final picture won't be reached for a while, a view re-emphasized by Wednesday's news on a three-month pause and the market volatility we saw again yesterday.
The read-through of this uncertainty into both capital markets and the real economy creates elevated risks in the near and medium term. In times like this, being positioned conservatively with balance sheet strength and operational resilience allows us to remain focused on serving our clients and continuing to execute on the ongoing transformation of BNY into a more platforms-oriented company.
Turning to the quarter and referring to page 2 of the quarterly update presentation, we delivered a very solid financial performance in the first quarter. Earnings per share of $1.58 were up 26% year over year on a reported basis and up 22% excluding notable items. Total revenue of $4.8 billion was up 6% year over year.
Expenses around the company remained well controlled, up 2% year over year. Taken together, we delivered another quarter of meaningful positive operating leverage, 346 basis points on a reported basis and 261 basis points excluding notable items. Our pre-tax margin improved to 32%, and our return on tangible common equity improved to 24%.
As I've noted before, BNY plays a central role in global markets, powering our clients with platforms across custody, security settlement, collateral payments, trading, wealth, investments, and more in over 100 markets around the world. Notwithstanding the current environment, we continue to see a meaningful opportunity from our work to better align ourselves as an integrated financial services platforms company.
Our transformation strategy includes both a new commercial coverage approach and our strategic platforms operating model, which together are designed to enhance the client experience and enable greater agility. The execution of this strategy is a significant exercise in change management, which requires hard work and takes time, but our teams around the world have embraced the opportunity and we are making progress.
This past quarter marked the first anniversary since we started the phased transition into our new operating model. And just one year in, we have more than half of BNY working in this new way. Already, we are starting to see how this transformation can drive top-line growth with greater scalability.
For instance, over the past year, our trade finance team is processing trade loans 60% faster. Our enterprise onboarding team is also working faster while seeing a more than 30% increase in onboarding volume. And our payments team has tripled the number of currencies we offer our bank clients to support consumer activity.
Complementing our platform work and building on the momentum with which we entered the year, our new commercial coverage model is proving increasingly effective in enabling more integrated client solutions from across the entire company. The first three months of the year represented our strongest sales quarter on record. The number of clients who bought from three or more lines of business has increased by 40% over the past two years, and we continued to see outsized sales growth with those multi-line of business clients.
In just one example, a large privately held multinational company where BNY has acted as custodian for the pension plan and corporate cash portfolio, where we provide corporate trust and debt capital market services and we provide wealth management to the company's senior executives, we recently expanded our relationship to also include supporting the company's collateral needs and managing short-term cash through our LiquidityDirect platform.
As I've said before, effectively cross selling the breadth of our platforms in this way and at scale represents the single most compelling growth opportunity for our company. As an institution with a long history of innovation, we have not forgotten that delivering new solutions is another important way for us to be more for our clients and to drive top-line growth.
We recently welcomed Carolyn Weinberg to the company as a member of the executive committee. She is now our Chief Product and Innovation Officer. Many people across our organization are focused on innovating new capabilities, instant payments, digital assets, wealth tech, private markets, collateral liquidity, all examples of domains where we are innovating. The addition of Carolyn in this new role will increase our leadership bandwidth to drive innovative new commercial opportunities and find new ways to leverage our platforms and data for client solutions.
While on the topic of innovation, I also want to take a moment to specifically call out the opportunity we see from AI at BNY. We've been taking a platform-based approach to AI capabilities, building and deploying solutions at scale with resilient, responsible guardrails throughout. We believe that our AI platform is going to be an important advantage for us as a large language model agnostic design leveraging frontier models from multiple leading providers.
To that end, in the first quarter, we announced a multi-year agreement with OpenAI, giving BNY access to cutting-edge tools and working with OpenAI to advance AI use cases in financial services. Over 80% of our employees have completed the prerequisite training to access Eliza, our AI platform. And more than 8,000 of them are already experimenting with personal AI agents, honing the skills they need to use AI effectively.
To date, we have deployed more than 40 AI solutions into production, with a significant additional number at various stages of building and testing. Collectively, we expect these to drive productivity gains, improved risk management, and to provide meaningful leverage to our people in the future. We strongly believe that by empowering our people with AI to do what we do better every day, we will harness great benefits over the coming years.
Before I hand the call over to Dermot, I want to close where I began. While the outlook for the operating environment has become more uncertain, we are prepared for a wide range of macroeconomic and market scenarios. Our ongoing work to operate BNY as a more platforms-oriented company, combined with our highly capitalized liquid and lower credit risk balance sheet positions us to manage dynamically and act as a source of strength as we support our clients in navigating the current environment.
I'd like to thank our people around the world for bringing intensity and excellence to drive us forward as one BNY. And with that, over to you, Dermot.