C’est reparti! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. One of my very favourite poems is this (I wonder why): He that buys land buys many stones, He that buys flesh buys many bones, He that buys eggs buys many shells, But he that buys good ale buys nothing else. It returns to me…

Don’t say this too loudly – but are the custody banks cooling on crypto? “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.” Willie Sutton, notorious bank robber, had this simple response when asked why he robbed banks. Every financial services regulator should have this quote framed and hung in their lobby. If in doubt,…

Some deals look great from the start. Others, not so much. Let’s, for one moment, put aside the question of why anyone, ever, anywhere, wants to make an acquisition. For all the associated flute music about product adjacencies, new skills and new markets, scope and scale, blah, blah, blah, M&A is a messy business, often…

There’s a new class of industry leaders waiting in the wings. Welcome to Generation XX. Joan Kehoe, Gunjan Kedia, Fiona Horsewill, Margaret Harwood-Jones, Claire Johnson, Zena Couppey, Kathryn Purves, Karen Malone, Kim Sgarlata, Chantal Free, Beth Mueller, Francesca McDonagh, Nancy Lewis. What do all these people have in common? Apart from the obvious, they are…

Don’t fret over the departure of Lou Maiuri from State Street. It will be BaU before you know it. A multinational corporation is similar to a giant game of Jenga. Pull a piece out, and you never know quite what is going to happen. Sell a business unit, and who knows exactly how it will…

Nearly 50 years after the “invention” of global custody, it’s back in fashion. Not long after he became CEO of State Street, Marsh Carter held his first analysts’ call. “Custody,” he opined, somewhat innocently, “is a mature business.” Wall Street did not like to hear this, and hammered the State Street stock. Lesson learnt. Thirty…

U.S. Bank has lost four senior executives in less than a year. Time for a refresh? When Joe Neuberger resigned as president of U.S. Bank’s global fund services business in late 2022 – after a 28-year career at the bank – the obvious solution was to install Christine Waldron, chief product officer for the wealth…

Marking the passing of the architect of the State Street we know today. 1975 was an important year. The Vietnam War ended. Microsoft was founded. Margaret Thatcher became leader of the UK’s Conservative Party. And Queen released “Bohemian Rhapsody”. But, for our industry, 1975 was important for a different reason. That year, the board of…

CACEIS wants to be the dominant inserv provider in Europe. The RBC deal won’t deliver that, but it’s a start. Some of you may be familiar with a Major League Baseball team called the Los Angeles Angels. That’s right: they are called (in translation) The Angels Angels. If the franchise paid anything to a branding…

2022 laid bare a lot of the industry’s shortcomings. In 2023, leaders need to fix the model. There is an inevitable, perhaps unbreakable, cycle in the investor services industry. We saw it at work in 2022, albeit with some different wrinkles. Here’s how it goes: custodians routinely underprice their core services – or, in some…