Okay, good morning. Thank you for joining us, everybody. We're going to get started with our next session. It is my pleasure to welcome Robin Vince, CEO of BNY. With over $50 trillion in custody assets, BNY is the largest and the most diversified global custodian, with differentiated capabilities across capital markets in businesses like clearing, collateral management, treasury services, wealth management. The list is long, so I'll have to cut it off at some point.
But that's part of the story, though. It is a broad business base, and that's one of the things that's been kind of exciting as part of the story.
Yeah.
That we're really unlocking that.
Yeah, no, we'll obviously get into that. Look, lots of important milestones this year. The fee growth has accelerated, NII has delivered. You guys continue to have very strong balance sheet return to capital. So who's not going to notice, right? The stock is up nicely. I think last time I checked, 50% or so. Year to date, one of the best performers in our group. So, definitely looking forward to hearing from you what's in store for next year. Welcome back. I guess, can we say welcome back? I feel like it's been a while.
Yeah.
But, you know, welcome.
I think I was with you two or three years ago.
That's right.
Here on this stage.
That's right. So happy to have you here. Why don't we start with a question just on ongoing execution?
Yeah.
It's, it's been, I think, about two years, a little over two years since you became CEO of BNY. At a time, you've emphasized the opportunity to really unlock, some of the power of different verticals you guys have by bringing them together, driving more, durable growth over time. As 2024 comes to a close, how would you describe the progress you guys made on this front?
The way that we think about it internally is that we're just getting started. I know that sounds a little trite, given the fact that we have executed well. We've made quite a bit of progress over the past two years. What we did right from the beginning when I took over as the CEO is the leadership team got together, and we really re-examined everything that we're doing, and we re-underwrote our businesses. You've got to remember, we've got this incredible broad franchise with a lot of trust in it from our client base. We touch, you know, 90%+ of most different constituencies that you can imagine: Fortune 500, global banks, global asset managers. That's because of our breadth of our businesses.
We have this broad range of businesses, and we are kind of complete in terms of the things that we want to have. So we're not just the world's largest custodian. Everybody thinks about us that way. It's great. We have got a trust bank inside of us, and we love that. But we're also the world's largest issuer services firm. We're the world's largest collateral manager. We're the world's largest securities lender. We have this top five payments clearing business. We're a top three wealth platform, sort of software and services. We have a $2 trillion asset manager. We have a high net worth business. And so what we recognized right from the beginning was that we had those things before, but we weren't monetizing them.
We weren't pulling them together and recognizing that one plus one plus one can equal five, and it really makes a difference how you operate and how you bring those things together. And so in 2023, we started to do three things.
Yeah.
We invested for the short term, the medium term, and the long term. And I call those that dimension of timeout because we recognized that we wanted to quickly bend the curve of the company, and we saw plenty of opportunities to do it. Our prior two years of expense growth had been 8% if you strip out currency effect. And so we said, you know what? We can do better than that. We can run the company better than that. We said we would halve it. We delivered 2.7% expense growth in 2023. And we had other points of outlook that we gave, and we hit them. And that was important because it was about execution and getting it done.
Yeah.
But simultaneously, we were looking at setting ourselves up for subsequent years and setting ourselves up for the out years. But we did it all at once because we recognized that that was ultimately what was required. So we started investing in new products, and we've launched Wove subsequently, launching Alts Bridge. We've been investing in each of the franchises. But most importantly, we invested in the culture and the team and this concept of coming together to run the company better, not just because it was going to be better and more satisfying for our people, although it is, but because that's the trick in monetizing across the different businesses. A client of one business, and by the way, that was the average number of businesses that the median client of the company consumed, one business.
But a client of one business can be a client of two or three or five, and that's what we've started to unlock. Now, we had to put a ton of new people, new process, restructure, move things around. But that's the journey that we've now started. But so many of these things are just getting going, in our opinion. And so it's been very gratifying to see the way that our employees, our shareholders, and very importantly, our clients have been responding to that. So, you know, it's fun. We're getting going.
Yeah. And look, it's a big change, a big cultural change for anybody who's covered the space for a while. Like, can obviously see that.
You know, I was traveling in Asia three weeks ago, and it was sort of an appropriate comment given the region, but one of our team members, I was doing a kind of a bigger team conversation. One of our team members said, they just stood up and they said, "Hey, I was doing a Q&A." And they said, "You know, I don't have a question. I just have a comment. The sleeping giant is awakening." And you know what? There's something that's actually right about that because we have these very significant market-leading platforms, but we were, to your point, just not getting after it.
Right.
And so getting after it is part of the trick. And that takes a lot of things to do that. But strategy needs great execution, and it needs great culture. And we're wrapping those things together.
Yeah. So let's take that a little further. As you look out for the next two to three years, and I hate to ask you to, like, rank order because you're probably not going to do that. But if you were to try to rank order, some of the biggest growth opportunities you see across the franchise, what are the things the market needs to focus on?
Our biggest, so if you look at our three segments, Market and Wealth Services is our fastest-growing segment that is also the most profitable segment of the company. And it's got the highest margin, 45%. One of the things that we have recognized is that you've got to think about the businesses and the segments a little bit differently. We can't just say, "Oh, we're going to do exactly the same thing in all of them. Let's just grow and be better." I mean, it's nonsense. We've been very discerning with a business-by-business strategy. Several of the businesses, unsurprisingly in that segment, have just got the opportunity to grow quickly. Because the margin's terrific, it's accretive to the company margin, we're very happy to just make those businesses grow. Guess what?
In this year, and you can see that in the first three quarters of the year, they have been. Our Treasury Services business has been one of our best-performing, quickest-growing businesses. Our Collateral Management business, we're the world's number one. I can talk a little bit more about some of the big trends going on in the world later on, but that is connected to some of the big trends. The Treasury, U.S. Treasury business, and just government debt generally and clearing. You know, we're a capital markets platforms company. We provide infrastructure and capabilities to capital markets. Capital markets are growing. We have the ability to connect to that. So that's an example. But at the same time, our biggest revenue business, a business that we're historically known for, Asset Servicing, has been performing incredibly well this year because we've been revving up the momentum.
We've been really driving to think creatively about solutions. We've been investing in streamlining the business. So the cost basis is improving. The margin's going up. We declared margin targets actually three years ago, I think, at this very conference. We talked about the fact that we wanted to be able to grow our margin in that business, in Securities Services as a segment. And we're halfway to that, close to that goal. That's been expenses, but it's also been top-line growth. So, you know, it's kind of something across the franchise. And that's one of the things that we're excited about, which is actually we're not missing something big. This is a self-help story.
Yeah.
Sure. New products, new clients, innovations. We're doing those things. But there's a lot of opportunity here associated with doing more of what we are doing with the clients that we have. It's an important part of the story so far.
Yeah. Well, let's unpack some of these, and I do want to start with Securities Services. It is still your largest fee pool. I think it accounts for a little bit over 40%-45% or so of the firm's total fees. As you noted, really nice growth acceleration. I think you're tracking kind of five-ish percent year- over- year through September. The question that I get a lot is how to help us separate kind of alpha versus beta. Markets have generally been constructive. There's certainly been a lot of volumes, and you guys get to benefit from some of that volume activity within Securities Services as well. So what's been driving the improvement outside of the macro? What's really sustainable? How do you think about the durability of that growth over time?
Sure. Well, I'll sort of, I'll say three things. So first of all, it is important to make sure that when there is beta, one is actually able to take advantage of the beta. So, you know, I think about ourselves a little bit like, you know, you're kind of a sailboat. You've got to have a good boat. You've got to have a good crew. But my goodness, when the wind blows, you better have your sails up and you catch it because you want to go. So positioning businesses to take advantage of trends and prevailing winds in that metaphor, and in this case, beta, is really important because otherwise the beta can just, like, slip you by. So we have a very deliberate focus on saying, "What's happening in the world?" And how do we align our businesses to be able to take advantage of that?
Beta's one example, but maybe the better example than alpha is, what are the mega trends that are going on in the world, and how do we make sure that our businesses are able to participate in and adapt to those mega trends, and so that's kind of the second point for me. If beta and being able to take advantage of it is number one, the mega trends and adapting to them is number two, so I'll give you some examples in asset servicing. Public markets, private markets. Okay, so that's a mega trend. It's been underway for a while.
Sure.
We provide a ton of services. We're number one in providing a ton of these services to the public markets. Let's make sure that we're adapting our product offerings and adapting our client franchise for the evolution that's underway in public to private. At the end of the day, public to private for many of these things is a wrapper. You know, you're investing in a company, public company, S&P 500. You're investing in a company and making it better in private equity, ditto to some extent in credit. Yeah, you've got more products, loans, etc. But it's ultimately a different structure, wrapper form. And so it requires product adaptation and evolution. It requires there are different constituents in the market. So that's what we've been doing. We've been pivoting the franchise associated with that trend. Another trend related to that is the direct wrapper. Okay.
Once upon a time, most stuff was in mutual funds or single stocks. Then it was ETFs. You know what? We're the largest in the ETF servicing, and we've been winning that business there. It's been growing significantly. But that's important because as the mega trend evolves, you've got to be able to catch it. And then next up is separately managed accounts. Very important. Mutual funds, ETFs, separately managed accounts. We didn't have all the capabilities there, so we've invested in that. We purchased Archer, which is one of the leading software platforms for separately managed accounts at scale. That serves our asset management business. It serves our Pershing distribution, almost $3 trillion of wealth distribution on that platform. Separate accounts is an important part of the RIA and broker-dealer wealth story.
And then, of course, it also is something that our own asset manager wanted to be able to take advantage of. So thinking about how the world, that's part of alpha. That's creating Alpha is hitching to these mega trends. Third point, operating differently. We weren't going to try to think that somehow the way we were doing everything before was going to be perfect for the future. And so it was part of our re-underwriting right from the beginning. How do we have to organize the pieces of BNY differently in order to be able to have them come together and be able to create solutions for clients, not just individual products that we might have been selling in the past? That's a cultural change. Cultural change is hard to engineer.
This is where we've been quite lucky because our people were frustrated by the siloed nature of how we used to be. They wanted to come together as one company, and so to make that tangible, every group, every one of the businesses that I mentioned earlier on had its own sales force. Everyone had its own customer onboarding. They all had their own call centers if they needed call centers. They all did their own KYC. Most of them did their own marketing. Some of them had their own HR. I mean, you couldn't have defined a more siloed conglomerate if you tried, but if the very heart of what our clients want is joining solutions together, we had to operationalize to come together as one, so what did we do? We hired a new Chief Commercial Officer.
She is in charge of all the sales groups around the company. And so guess what you can do when you do that? When a client knocks on the door on one product, you can show them how actually it complements something else. And so now you can have two sales. You can go to a client and say, "Oh, I know you were just trying to talk to us about Asset Servicing or custody, but we're a way better custodian because we can also talk to you about distribution." That $3 trillion of wealth assets in Pershing is distribution. We're having a better conversation with an Asset Servicing client. Your question about alpha in Asset Servicing because we can now talk to them about how we can help them with our capabilities through Pershing. We also have digital assets capabilities. I just mentioned separate accounts. Okay.
So you're trying to move from mutual funds to ETFs to separately managed accounts? No problem. We've got it all. And so the completeness of what we have for the Asset Servicing constituency helps us win more business in Asset Servicing because they have their eyes on the value of us delivering the whole company to them.
I got you. Great. That's great background. I wanted to shift gears and talk about markets and wealth services. It's really nice to see that you guys bringing this to light a lot more, given a very different nature of that business and a very different growth profile. I can't tell you how many times I talk to investors, and it's like, it's all about assets under custody. I'm like, it really doesn't drive the business all that much. Can we stop talking about this? But if you think about the key drivers in a couple of different businesses, they're clearing and collateral management, always stood out as one of the really differentiated and quite fast growers. I think revenues there were up something like 20% last year. I think they're up 15-ish percent year to date. It's been really encouraging to see.
Help us think about the durability of that growth and really what are the key drivers of that growth over time, given that it is a bit of a unique business for you?
It's really two businesses in one. We think about it as two platforms, our clearing platform and our collateral platform. While they're related to each other, and obviously they to the point of solutions, we often deliver solutions with both of them together. Let me answer your question by sort of pulling them apart slightly because the answer's a little different. We're back into the beta, the world of beta, and the world of mega trends and the breadth of BNY. Let me just touch on each of them. Treasuries are a growth business. You may love it, you may hate it, but if you're a shareholder, you like it because we're in the fixed income clearing business. We're in the equity clearing business too, but we have a particularly important role to play in the U.S.
Treasury business where the Fed and the U.S. Treasury are clients of ours, and so it's not surprising that as the total amount of U.S. debt outstanding grows, the volumes and activity and notionals in our treasury business are growing, but this is a great example of the change under the hood that not everybody sees because we actually had three clearing businesses before: Treasuries, yeah, well known for it. Maybe not quite as known for a pretty meaningful equity and corporate bond clearing business in the U.S., and we also have international clearing that we offer in Europe, but those businesses were separately run, so when a client knocked on the door and they said, "Hey, BNY, I don't want to do, I want to do some clearing.
Who should I talk to?" We'd say, "Well, what type of clearing do you want to do?" And if they said all three, we'd say, "Okay, we call this one for this, this for this, this for this." It's crazy. The client hangs up, they go somewhere else. Now we've pulled it all together. We have one global clearing business. So now we can serve clients who want to do things consistently across the board. And so we're easier to do that business with, and we do more business as a result. So that's a change. What else is happening? So that's clearing. But if you look now at collateral management, collateral management's more of an example of another mega trend that we're very focused on, which is the evolution towards what people do from what people do themselves to outsourcing.
And the same thing's true in asset servicing, which we talked about before. There are so many things that a large asset manager, a large broker-dealer, a large investment bank or bank used to say, "Hey, I should do that myself because I think somehow there's alpha or operational efficiency. If I do it myself, I can do it better." I can assure you across $6 trillion worth of assets on our collateral platform, ain't no one in the world bigger or more global, and they certainly cannot do it better. Definitionally, they cannot do it better because every fraction of a basis point in collateral management is about optimization and perfection of a portfolio. It's treasuries connected to bonds, connected to gilts, connected to Korean equities, connected to everything in the world.
And if you're, if you own collateral, if you own stuff and you want to finance it, your best perfect optimization is going to be by having all of that stuff be able to be part of the same algorithm. It's impossible to replicate. And so what we have realized is that the investment in technology, we've got a new system called One Collateral that is really operationalizing that ability to leverage our position in the world, and it's fundamentally changing. So yeah, is there more collateral? Sure. Is there more collateral in more places in a fragmented world? Sure. Is making it come together as one picture more important than ever for clients? Sure. But we also have this capability that actually does something that really isn't possible to do unless you have all the pieces that we have. And so there's absolute alpha there.
The final point I'd make is on many of these businesses, because of our history around being the world's largest custodian, love it. Got a great trust bank inside. People trust us. We're big. We're a market leader. Fantastic. But because of that, people tend to fall into the trap of thinking that our business is just based on asset values or notional. Not so. Transactions, clearing about transactions, collateral management about transactions and balances and software sales. So you've got these different components that are driving our revenue, and that is another trend that's been a little bit buried beneath the surface that we want to try to do a better job exposing, which is it could be software sales. Percentage of the company revenue driven by software is gradually growing. It's still low, but it's growing. Software and services combined, pretty chunky.
Transaction volumes, notionals, activity levels of different kinds, those things are all firing different bits of the engine, and what you're seeing in a year like this is not only, yes, do we have a bunch of things firing, but it creates a resilience to the earnings profile because not just about asset values anymore. Sure. Classic custody, asset values up, good. Asset values down, bad. Now, well, tell me the conditions. If they go down because there's more volatility in the world and activity levels are going up, maybe I kind of like that.
Right. So a bit more countercyclicality and more durability, which is obviously important to you.
More diversification. Again, it goes back to the breadth of who we are. We have these different components, and they're able to power us forward. And it's not just theoretical diversification. It's applied diversification because it's how clients can actually benefit from those pieces coming together as well.
Yeah. I wanted to hit another on another big business for you guys, another good growth business, which is Pershing. I think on the last call, you talked about net new assets growth in that business being at around 4%. That's excluding First Republic deconsolidation, which I think is largely behind you at this point. Talk to us a little bit about the growth algorithm for this business over the next several years. But also I do want to put it in the context of some of the competitive dynamics that are going on in the space where, clearly there's more move to the RIA custody-only business. That's a good thing. But also there's a lot of M&A in the traditional, independent broker-dealer space, LPL, for instance, being a big consolidator, and that takes some of that business away from you guys. How do you balance between the two?
How do you navigate that, and how do you think about the growth?
Well, you know, there's a, there's a plus-minus to the consolidation story because obviously there can be consolidation. If a consolidator happens to be a self-service provider, then they're going to be, and they win business. And then obviously that's, that would be, that would be a headwind. But many of our clients, and this has been the strategy with Pershing for a long time, is to be with consolidators. So if you are a non-self-clearing consolidator, and many of our clients are at scale and growing and acquiring, then we represent the platform that makes it easier for them to just go buy something else and roll it in. And so we have, if you look, if you look across the clients on our client platform, we have a bunch that respond to that description, and they're like, "Okay, because I have Pershing, it's much easier for me.
I can just buy somebody, and I can just, put them on the platform." Now, maybe they convert over a little period of time, but, so that's sort of the competitive dynamics. Now, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of market share up for grabs there, and this is a place where another of our attributes as a company is quite valuable in the sales pitch and I’d argue it’s probably going to be more valuable in the future than maybe it has been in the past. If you’re an RIA and you’re looking at who you’re competing with for assets, you’re competing with a couple of storefront names that are in the clearing business, but also compete with you every day to win assets for the advisor.
And so when we look to this with some clients, we're like, "Why are you using them?" Because they're a platform, sure, but they really are competing with you on the front door. If you didn't have any choice, I understand. But you could use us, and we're not competing with you because we don't run a retail network.
Sure. Yeah.
So that's actually an important theme. But the other thing, and probably the most important thing about Pershing, is that we've been investing in broadening out the product set. It's been our single biggest investment that we've really made over the course of the past few years is to be able to have a more complete solution in Pershing. And so we launched Wove. So we have the investor tools that we've had in that for Pershing for a long time. All the things that an investor needs, the execution, the reporting, the websites, the portfolios, all of that stuff. But we didn't have solutions for advisors. And so we launched the Wove, which is really the advisor capability.
So now we have wealth planning, we have direct indexing, we have portfolio construction, and that gives us the gateway to connect the rest of the company because historically, Pershing separate over here, Investment Management, other bits of the company over there. And so what we're doing now is we just had a conversation with a client very recently where they said, "You know what? I want to be able to go after this particular demographic, but I'm going to need some very particular ETFs to be able to do it." Well, we got an Investment Management direct indexing. Mellon creates ETFs. We create, can create ETFs for that client as part of a bundled solution. Three years ago, we'd have never had the thought. We'd have never had the conversation. Now those two groups come together.
They sit with a client, and they're like, "We can do more things for you. Banking as a service. We provide checking, debit, everything that you need, bill pay to wealth managers." It's a great irony. We only used to provide it to non-Pershing wealth managers. Now we're bringing those two things together, and we're starting to say to ourselves, "Gosh, why wouldn't we distribute banking-related services to more Pershing clients?" Because we've got treasury services. They've got all the capabilities. It's what they do. They used to just do it for big institutions. Now they can do it for the RIAs and smaller broker-dealers as well. By the way, we provide that service to a G-SIB wealth manager.
Yeah. So a lot, a lot more ways to integrate, as you, as you pointed out earlier. Okay. I have a lot more strategic questions, but I do want to get to some of the financial ones as well. So why don't we, why don't we pivot a little bit? Well, we have, we have to do that every once in a while right here. So I did want to go back to some of the comments you guys made around the forward outlook on the last earnings call. You talked about Q4 and NII being slightly below Q3 levels and expenses for the year being roughly flat. So I think that also implies Q4 feels kind of like Q3 in terms of expenses.
So maybe just give us a mark-to-market on your current expectations for both of these, and then to an extent you have any early look into 2025. Let's talk a little bit about that as well.
Right. So what we did at the beginning of 2023 is, we provided, you know, an outlook for the year. We guided on three things. We did the same thing at the beginning of 2024. We guided on three things. We would like to keep it simple, and we like to make sure that we are on track. We obviously delivered it last year. This year's not quite done, but Dermot, our CFO, reported that we've been very much on track with that. Look, for NII and for the quarter overall, you know, we looked at it, and I would say that the quarter is finishing on the stronger side, which is great on the revenue. But at the same time, revenue-related expenses have also been part of that story.
And so we've had both of those things have been up a little bit, and we view that as good because we're pleased with the investment that's coming with that. With NII, Dermot had previously guided that we would potentially be sequentially down. Probably that's not the case anymore from three to 4Q. We're not giving guidance for 2025 at this point, but I'll reiterate what Dermot already said, which is that we don't see NII as a headwind for next year. He mentioned that a few weeks ago, and you know, that situation still seems broadly right.
The comment on NII for the quarter, is it a function of activity? So like repo has been helpful generally. Is it a function of deposits coming in stronger? What's been sort of driving the slightly better than expected?
Yes. Yes. And, you know, continue just great discipline and execution by our CIO team on the balance sheet because, you know, NII is shrinking as a percentage of our company, which we view as a good thing. So we're not there like to the whims of the world in terms of what's happening, just in NII, but, and we have a, as you know, a very tight balance sheet, and we sort of view ourselves more and more of as, as a, as a sort of platforms company delivering these big platform capabilities to our financial services company, to our financial services clients. But, but at the same time, you know, NII has been a good story for us, and so yes, it's all of the above.
I would just say the operating. Dermot's talked a lot about this before, so I won't, sort of repeat it all, but we've just fundamentally changed the operating nature of how we manage liquidity in the company. It's like another example of de-siloing. You know, everybody used to price deposits as kind of a hobby on the side of their desk in the businesses. That's a science. It's not something you just stick your finger in the air and say, "Hey, Fed funds minus something." You actually really think about it. The funnel of should money go into a money market fund, or is it better on our balance sheet? We're part of a $1.5 trillion cash ecosystem. We choose to pluck a certain amount of deposits out of the ecosystem, but the rest of it, we've still got the ability to monetize using these other capabilities.
We have a software platform, Liquidity Direct. Treasurers come. They can put a deposit. They can buy a money market fund, somebody else's money market fund, CP bills. So we've grown the funnel of the liquidity ecosystem, and that allows us, together with our operational change of platforms, to monetize things differently, and this platform story isn't just a top-line story in terms of we are financial services platforms and they join together and provide solutions for clients. It's also an operating thing for the company because we are just reorganizing how these pieces come together. You know, I mentioned liquidity used to be done in silos. Now we have one global liquidity solutions team. They run it together. We have one KYC team. We have one client onboarding team.
Going to try to do client onboarding and try to do more things for clients kind of helps if you've got one team making it easier to onboard the marginal stuff. That's how we've planned. So this platform's operating model, as we call it, is a critical component and complement to the way that we think about the business opportunity.
Staying on the balance sheet point for a second, I did want to touch on capital. You guys have been returning capital at a pretty steady pace, and obviously welcomed by investors. The capital position in the business remains to be quite strong. I guess you're also on track to return as at about 100% or more of earnings, this year. How are you thinking about capital priorities into 2025 between balance sheet growth, acquisition, dividends, share purchases? And as a caveat to that, and again, nobody has crystal ball, but it feels like there could be some easing in capital requirements on a regulatory front for the banks. You guys have not been drastically impacted by this, but to an extent, it is helpful. I'm just curious how you're thinking about that excess capital that could come through.
So first of all, yeah, we're a relatively capital-light, capital-generative business. It's the nature, increasingly the nature of our business to be that way because, you know, you can feel this emphasis of these big, software services at scale platforms that we're really delivering, we're investing in. And so that's kind of the evolution of the company. We've kind of in the same way that we've got a trust bank inside us, you should sort of also think of us a little bit as having a bank inside us. We view a bank as a critical tool, a valuable tool to deliver many of our services. But there are many things that we do that really just don't need the bank very much because it's not the nature of what they do. So having a high-quality balance sheet that's capital-generative, that's important.
We like that bit of the strategy. It's obviously been working quite well. The NII is nice, of course, to have and valuable as a complement. But if you think about the way we sort of analyze our capital, first, do we need to deploy into the business? And to the extent that we need to, we will. The next is. Is there anything that we want to acquire? Is there anything that's going to complete us a little bit more? Archer was a good example of that. It was a sort of smallish acquisition, but it really completed us with a capability that we felt was missing. So that's great. Tend to be more capabilities-driven thought process. And then at the end of the funnel is like, what's left? We want to distribute. We want to have a good dividend.
That's sort of about a 30% return. And so that's good. And then the rest is buybacks. And this year, we've. You've seen all three work in exactly that way. We've been conservative and thoughtful about managing the balance sheet. Uncertainty on rates is a part of that. Uncertainty on capital, as you pointed out, was a thing at various points. We've made an acquisition, and we raised our dividend, and we've returned capital. So it's sort of. You can see that whole process working. You know, for capital requirements for the industry, you're right. It wasn't. Basel III Endgame wasn't as big a thing for us as it was for some of the others.
Sure.
I don't. I'd be surprised if you see capital levels go down from where they are now in any meaningful way. The industry's benefited a lot from high cap, higher capital levels, higher liquidity levels. The industry's super safe as a result. And you can see that with the G-SIBs. We're a G-SIB. And so having that strength and nothing to see it. Nobody talked about the G-SIBs other than as rescuers, in the events of last year. And that's as it should be. And we benefit from that. We're one of the highest credit rated, as you know. So that's a good story. And then the question then becomes, okay, well, will it go up? And I think the chances of it going up have shrunk a lot. And so some other firms have clearly benefited from that more than us.
But that's okay.
Got it. Okay. Well, lots more to cover, but unfortunately, we're out of time. So you're going to have to come back next year. But thank you for doing this. Always great to see you here.
Good to be with you, Alex. Thanks to everybody.