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…
Category: Analysis
Hello Goodbye
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…
ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
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…
FIVE EASY PIECES
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…
Over, Under, Sideways, Down (RIP Jeff Beck)
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…
The Song Remains the Same (2022 Remix)
BBH is back in the game, after a good deal was killed by dumb regulators. In 1996, The Bank of New York made an audacious, and doomed, bid to take over State Street. It was not BNY’s finest hour. Its C-suite executives had completely misread the resolve of State Street’s board, senior management team and…
TWILIGHT ZONE
All shall have prizes. Some deserve them more than others. If you haven’t won an award this year, you’re doing something wrong. We are at peak award season, when it seems that just about everybody with a pulse is posing with a lump of Lucite at yet another gala dinner – whatever that is –…
THE LONG & WINDING ROAD
State Street has not had a good week. However much lipstick you put on a pig, it’s still a pig. State Street will be very relieved to see the back of this particular pig, preferably as a nice plate of bacon. Q3 earnings were modest at best, rescued by net interest income, which rose 36pct…
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
RBC always sought relevance – but the market moved against it, despite its best efforts. I was about to board a train on the Paris Metro when I received a call from Harry Samuel, then the head of RBC Investor & Treasury Services. He wanted to let me know that the business was withdrawing from…
AGAINST THE WIND? Private markets will be transformed by tokenisation. Are administrators ready?
Here’s a news story you might have missed: “The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) is the first European museum to tokenize a masterpiece to democratize art investment. In partnership with Rubey and Tokeny, KMSKA has leveraged the legal, marketing and technological expertise of both teams to launch its compliant ERC-3643 based security token…