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…
Category: Analysis
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…
For What It’s Worth
Custody is dead. Long live custody. The results are in and, predictably, market observers are focused on the wrong thing. First things first: the banks that have a serious custody/inserv business did well in 2021, generally reporting good revenue growth against the continuing backdrop of low, zero or negative interest rates. Can you hear the…
Why Diversity Isn’t Always All-Inclusive – Stephen Doyle has a powerful message for proponents of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
“The good news is that you didn’t have a stroke. The bad news is it looks like you might have Parkinson’s Disease.” These were the words uttered by my neurologist almost five years ago. Since that day (which is forever etched in my memory), I have learnt that my neurologist was correct. I did in…
Something in the Air
Were you surprised by BlackRock’s selection of its new providers? You shouldn’t have been, if you’ve been paying attention for the last five years. When you’re on a winning streak, the best thing you can do is to keep on doing the same things you’ve been doing that helped you to win in the first…
You Might Think – State Street & BBH are more compatible than you might think.
Well, that didn’t age well. Barely a month after I argued that BBH’s investor services business should remain independent, it goes and does a USD3.5bn deal with State Street. Whilst the counterparties might hope that I would entitle this article “Stairway to Heaven”, it’s probably fairer to call it “You Might Think”, and here’s why.…