Okay, thank you everybody for joining us. I do have a disclosure, and then we'll move on. For important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The taking of photographs and use of recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Well, today, from Northern Trust, we are delighted to have with us Tom South, Chief Information Officer, and Jason Tyler, CFO. Thanks so much for joining.
Thanks, Betsy, and congratulations! The conference is, like, busy. It's up 30, 20, 30% this year?
Yep. From the investor perspective, yes.
Fantastic.
Thrilled to have that.
A lot of great discussions, so congratulations.
Thank you so much, Jason. Appreciate it. Tom, I think we're going to kick off with a prepared remarks from yourself on the Chief Information Officer outlook here. Would you like to indicate to people about the slides?
I sure would. Thank you. If once you get done with the exciting disclaimer on Morgan Stanley's side, you can go to our site and take a look at the slides. I'm going to talk about in a few minutes on our tech journey, as it relates to some of our investments in technology. Yeah. Thank you, Betsy. I'm Chief Information Officer for Northern Trust, and have been for the last four years. If you look at the slides, you'll see a lot of four-year time horizons. I'll explain to you why I'm taking responsibility for those and not anything prior to that.
I do want to get a little bit of a baseline fact base we can work from as we have a dialogue on this topic as we go forward, and you'll see that in the first slide if you do download and follow along. What we really talk about there is, it will be no mystery to anybody here, the demand for IT services has really driven a narrative that I included there. One is our workforce, and there's been a real fight for talent in IT in the last few years. There always has been, but it's really accelerated in the last few years. At Northern Trust, we're 6,500-ish strong workforce, and been growing the last few years. We'll talk about that in a few minutes in terms of the pace of growth.
We happen to have really been focused on two things the last couple of years. One was balancing our footprint globally. Our, certainly our employee footprint is about 50% U.S. and 50% non-U.S. Much different than it looked three or four years ago. The other focus is just on engagement and talent attraction. We took advantage of some of the health crisis opportunities, as well as our brand opportunities to attract talent. We continue to have what I'll call in our industry and in the industry, ultra-low turnover rates. 5%, 6% has been our historic average, and really in the last, moved back towards that in the post-health crisis era.
A really strong talent base to work from, but an unabated demand for services over the last three or four years. We've included a few metrics you see in there. I won't quote all of those to you, but demand from our businesses is up in terms of new capability for clients. Our regulators have pushed us, you'll see some of this when I get into investments, on resiliency investments and emerging technologies. Another thing that's really been a driver for us is the emerging, you know, information cybersecurity threats and the realization of some of those over the last few years. Starting in December 2020, you'll see a pretty sharp uptick if you turn over to our investments page.
I mean, the SolarWinds attack was, I think, an eye-opener in terms of supply chain and then the successful ransomwares from there that went on in 2021 and 2022. We've been an investor there in a big. The demand, not from just the business, but from a risk and regulatory perspective as well. The last thing is we strived to make sure that that change agenda did not impact our performance negatively in terms of our clients. They were clamoring for higher reliability, higher resiliency as well. From a brand reinforcement perspective, you know, a safe port in storms is sort of our model, you know. It isn't just about financial upheaval, others as well.
You know, in the course of that huge uptick in demand, we've been experiencing 20%-25% year-over-year change volumes in IT, which doesn't sound particularly exciting, but that's more and more new capability or upgraded capability to our clients. Our change quality metric, which we're watching very closely, to stay steady, to improve every year. It's been modest, but it's been, you know, in the face of what historically for us has been 4% increase in change volumes to go to 20%-25% was a big change. We're pretty proud of that. Big investment in that talent, the kind of risk resiliency and capability foundation, and then the metrics around that to sort of support the fact that we're not going too fast. I guess that would be the question that we often got.
If you move past, that's the kind of what we've been doing, from an activities perspective and the demands on us. I want to mention that, like everybody else, we built out a robust remote network at that time. We replaced every of our employees' and contractors' equipment in that time. Not exciting stuff, but it's been important to activities. I want to take us to the investments of what that took to do all that, right? Over the last, really, we use a four-year time horizon with a projected 23. I should probably disclaim this if it isn't on the slide, that none of this is meant to be precise. I'll let the CFOs be precise. You invite the tech guy, you're going to get some broad commentary on this.
Well, actually, I'll take that back. I'm going to talk about our strategy going forward, and then I'll talk about investments. The strategy going forward has really got three key pillars and some supporting activities, and they're probably not rocket science, but they're important from our perspective, that they're what was going to drive our investment. The first one is continue the reimagination of our core platforms. Like a lot of firms, this includes modernization and cloud activity. Along with that, I know we're going to talk probably a little bit about that going forward, but a pretty big pivot for us.
Just to put it out there, when I took this role on, we took a position of being a private cloud company, meaning we are building mostly for private deployment, not very much public cloud usage at all. That was for a variety of reasons. In part, our risk and control environment around public cloud was uncertain. We were coming off of a couple of really public breaches in that space. From a brand perspective, you think about why clients were attracted to us, that, you know, stability, safety, and reliability were a big part of that. We took a position on private cloud at that time. We certainly have pivoted on that in the last year. We expect to see substantial growth in our public cloud usage. It's happening already. Significant plans for 2024, 2025, 2026.
We shouldn't read that as all incremental investment, though we'll take away from some other things we've been doing. An exciting pivot for us that started really this year. That reimagined our core platform is really migration of them into our cloud infrastructure. Our next pillar isn't going away. It's on risk and resiliency. We continue to think that these are uncertain times in terms of markets and in stability writ large for our clients, and we want to make sure we are their most dependent on counterparty or provider. We have work we want to finish the swing on in terms of resiliency.
Major, this is the ability not just to prevent service interruptions, but to recover from the most unthinkable of such for our clients and for our shareholders, but also to continue to build what we think of as a more and more adaptive information security and risk posture, where our capability is much more directly linked to our appetite, and where some of the new emerging technologies we inevitably will talk about here today, continue to play a bigger role in some of our information security activities. We've made huge investments there, and we expect some of those to moderate, we don't want to think the job is done at this point. Certainly not a mission accomplished banner going up anytime soon.
To go along with those two, both of them sort of iterative and adaptive kind of processes, our operating models continuing to shift. The move that has been underway in our shop for 3 or so years, moving towards a product mindset, small teams, iterative development. We continue to be pushing that agenda pretty hard right now, and we think that's important from a speed to market perspective. Every group we have moved into our new cloud model has experienced a 5 to 10x increase in the pace of change. That's what's driving some of that change pace. We want to make sure the operating models there support that from a quality perspective and stability perspective. The last thing I would really say is underlying all of that is a focus on productivity.
Jason will penalize me probably from a compensation perspective if I don't mention productivity at least three times. Right? You think, why is that important? I mean, I know, and we had some conversations earlier on this topic. You know, we've modeled out the cloud migration. There's a really interesting financial return in a few years out. We worry a bit about a trough of investment that goes into the J-curve kind of thing. Right? We worry a little about that near term. We're trying to be very thoughtful in the timing on that. One of the best ways we can get after this, some of our near-term productivity.
There's a fair amount of automation in our IT operation space, as well as in the information delivery space that we think are really exciting. You know, I don't want to get into AI just yet, but we think that play has an exciting role to play in quality assurance and secure software coding practices. All kinds of areas where, you know, language-based activities, code, in this case, can be something we can get leverage out of. We're really. You know, we think about those three things, operating model, reimagine and modernize our core platforms, and continue to build our risk, adaptive risk and resiliency posture to have an underlying theme around productivity, which I think is really important to fund that journey and sustain it over time.
The last thing I want to focus on, really was, that I think there'll be a lot of questions around was on our investments. Just to give you a little bit of context, and you'll see it on the next slide if you're following along. IT spending's been growing at the firm. It's not, Jason will remind me, not coincidental to me taking on this role. We had a plan, and we started to go after that plan pretty hard, but it's been growing in double digits, you know, a little over 11% CAGR, as we measure it here on the slide. We break it into three buckets that I think are at least useful to think about that investment.
The business-driven investments make up 50% or more of that total IT investment. That's a good thing, right? We should be growing our businesses and investing in capabilities for our clients, both prospective and current. The fastest growing part of that spend over those four years has been in this risk and resiliency bucket. Part realization of threats in the world were more real than any of us realized. Part pressure from regulating partners that are also realizing those threats are more real than realized before. It's, it's not that it's only 10% of our spend, but it's been going up very fast over the last few years. That's the part I think will moderate some, although it will not return to its pre-health crisis kind of levels.
The third thing we talk about is really core infrastructure modernization. This is the modernization in our data centers and the eventual migration out of our data centers. We're already a pretty big consumer of VPN as a service. Desktop as a service is growing in our shop. Our middleware messaging capabilities we think become cloud-based over the next few years. There's a fair amount of migration of in data center work out over the next few years. We've got, you know, Jason will remind me, we've got to get the economic timing model right, but an exciting migration for us. If I look, that's our kind of, you know, past, that risk and resiliency growing at 30%+ from a really low base.
It was only about 2% or 3% of our total at one point. Our modernization growing double digits. We expect to see some moderation on the risk and resiliency, but not a regression to the past. We expect the growth to go back into some of the business-driven activity for our clients. I went through that pretty quick, but I also would just point out that, you know, it's been hard to predict. Again, I would not have when I came into this role, I didn't come into it saying: We're going to spend a lot on cybersecurity and resiliency. I think realities of the marketplace sort of helped determine some of that for us. You know, we lay these plans pretty loosely.
I think the thing we're most convicted around is the public cloud opportunity in front of us, both from an innovation perspective and a scale and cost management perspective. Very exciting, as well as the speed to delivery I mentioned earlier. I did include in here, and I probably won't spend too much time because it gets to be a deeper topic, but differentiation. We try to think about what's differentiating. I included some notes on the last key slide here and talk about what we're focused on. This rapid delivery model has really been exciting for us to see the early returns on. I talked about cloud and some of the resiliency in the sixty. We've had a 63% improvement in reliability in the last four years in the face of a pretty uncertain time.
That includes our remote work environment and everything else, but, as I said, a 20%+ growth trajectory on changes. Really outstanding performance, and our clients have started to give us really good feedback on that. This really key component of integrating emerging technology is really important. You can't go through any session like these without talking about AI, what implications it has for firms. We've got some thoughts on that we can share, but I did want to note that these are driving exciting business growth opportunities. I don't want to come up here and say, "Well, we're fixing a lot of plumbing." That's not what we're doing at all. I would just highlight a few things that I think are really important on the growth side that we're in the middle of right now.
We're in the middle of a super exciting kind of 2.0 version of our Goals Driven Wealth Management tools platform. It's a behavioral thing that's made to interact with clients. There's several patents, tech patents pending on this integration and collaboration technology we built. We're incredibly excited about. We'll go to market sometime this year. We're doing the alpha work with clients and prospects already right now. Massive driver of our win rate in the wealth management space. Our next generation information delivery, our data mesh that we're building out, you're going to find like we built the goals-driven work, we're doing this data delivery work with our clients. That's one of our differentiators, is we build a lot of software with our clients rather than for our clients.
That's really been a big shift for us in the last, in the last, you know, two or three years. You know, you saw just last week, I saw it on LinkedIn, a social network for our asset owner clients. We've got two big initiatives on asset owners, an area that I think five years ago, people thought wasn't a particularly exciting space. It has been and is. The social network for our asset owners and the kind of investment tools we've built around them, Front Office Solutions, we call it, that lets asset owners get a lot more sophisticated in terms of how they might in-house manage some components of what they do. The last two things I'll mention, a renovation of...
A complete renovation of the way we think about our transfer agency business, starting in Europe. Much more contemporary identification of individual investors and, you know, a lot of Face ID, facial ID and Voice ID and things like that we're really excited about. We're in alpha and beta, work with various clients right now. Lastly, our client engagement hub on our asset management business is sort of an immersive current and prospective client digital experience we haven't had before, that we think puts us on footing with the most world-class of firms and engages new clients around the world and understand and see our products in action and the ethos around those and the managers around those. I can...
I could name a longer list, but we certainly see that building with clients and the speed at which we're starting to deliver, as differentiators for our tech organization at this point.
Super. Well, that was a great overview. I have to say, you answered half of my questions. I have another half that have emerged from your, from your talk. Maybe we can go through a few of those. Then also, as always, if there's questions from the audience, we'll have time for that as well. Before I dig into some of the key elements that you've mentioned, I think if we could just, you know, take it up a level and ask the question around the tech budget itself. How does Northern Trust think about the tech budget? How do you think about building that? How do you think about, you know, supporting that growth? Is that something that we should continue to expect, is that 10%-12% from here? What's the driver?
I'll be very careful. I've got our CFO here in front of me. In a tech conference, I'd be speaking very differently about it. Tough, real talk, real tough at those conferences, yeah. No, in all candor, in all candor, particularly the risk and resiliency activities, we took an eyes-open view around incremental investment there. We thought it was important from a risk and regulatory perspective. We thought it was important from a brand perspective. You know, Jason made a comment earlier, for all the right reasons, we made some of those decisions. I do think those were the right reasons. We absolutely have a multi-year model that has this high overall IT trajectory, that growth slowing some and certainly into the single digits in the near term.
We've got a plan around that we worked. Obviously, I'm joking around. We're very collaboratively on that plan on a long-term basis. We certainly expect that to be the case. I do want to talk about how we think about that budget, because this continues to be a differentiator. You know, we're often in the finals presentations against larger peers, and the tech and service are the two of the big differentiators there. We think about there's a baseline, and I won't get into the numbers because they're not going to be particularly meaningful year in and year out. There's a baseline it takes to run the machine, to be in a, you know, elite wealth manager or global asset servicer and an asset manager at our size.
There's, there's a component that's just that you have to do it every year. On top of that, we have really two things. It's our desire for growth and our appetite for risk. Those are the two things we are increasingly talking overtly about how they determine what goes on top of that baseline. I think the, the thing that Jason's tent is bringing is thinking about it, the growth trajectory of this relative to our core expense, right? It's been growing almost 2.5x, 3x that over the last few years. That'll come into a range, and we'll have a longer-term range we'll probably establish, although we haven't done so formally.
It feels like part of that driver is this migration to public cloud. Is that a fair takeaway from your statement?
It's certainly a key part of it, yeah.
Okay.
That's. Like I said, we've got to be really thoughtful about that because we're going to move, in our case, from a lot of CapEx and depreciation-driven investments to a lot more real, you know, real consumption-based expense. I know people have been going through this the last couple of years, but the model for us is one we've got to be very thoughtful around so that we don't create too deep a trough, right? That we use make sure that productivity can help us cover that. We've been pacing that out, and we will pace that out. The good news on that front, that's the low truth, is a lot of our key providers are doing some of that work for us, too, right?
Whether it's in our fund services business or in our wealth management business, we're dependent on some pretty key vendors as well. They're moving as fast as, faster than we are in this space. A lot of this is coming at us with the work they're doing, the partnerships we have. We think that's a positive for our business long term, because everything about the economic modeling does tell us that it's got a positive return long term.
Okay. I often ask people this question around: How's the tech budget split between a run the bank and a change the bank? I don't know, you're the first tech person in a while I've had up on stage, so I'm just wondering, do you feel like that's a good question, or is that a dopey financial bank analyst question?
Well, I probably wouldn't say the second, even if I really thought.
Okay.
Actually, it's a metric we've tracked. Again, it's not GAAP.
Oh.
It's sort of some judgment that goes into it. We've tried to keep track of that because we worry that, you know, too much of your day-to-day BAU eats up your ability to innovate and build new capabilities and new businesses. We're running it. It depends, again, it depends how you slice it, but running it about a little over 40% on change and a little under 60% on run. It goes up and down every year. That's again because we made this purposeful investment in some of the risk and resiliency things, that's down a little bit from where we were. But it's on the uptick this year.
It'll be on the uptick the next few years, we'll get back to our norm because we want to make sure we're delivering as much as we can for clients. To answer your question, whether it's a good question, it on a five-year basis, it's a really good question that I think every organization needs to ask. On an any one-year basis, it could be a little bit idiosyncratic in terms of impacts, that's a little bit of our story, certainly for last year, for example.
Could you just dig in a little bit or explain a little bit about what you're doing with the wealth side that you mentioned?
Well, a lot actually. The first thing I mentioned, the tools I mentioned, this kind of Goals Driven Wealth Management practice we built is just that. I mean, it sort of describes it. It's very much a goals-driven toolset that a lot of firms have been using over the last seven or 10 years. We started developing this on the heart of last financial crisis, I don't know which crisis we're on, but in 2008 and 2009, we started building this out. It started with an acquisition, actually, as Jason had mentioned somewhat earlier, and we built upon this. The process is not just about, you know, kind of slider bars and goals.
It's meant for getting them involved with the family in the room and kind of going through their financial lives and their lives in general. It's actually really. I haven't been through it myself with my family. It's pretty enlightening. We're building a cloud-based version of that to allow us to do a lot more what-if modeling with clients in front of them in a real-time way. It's really exciting. I've actually played with the new version now, they can start to ask questions and where we would say, "Well, let's take those as notes, and we'll come back with proposals around them," do all this in real time because of the cloud compute capacity that's available to us and the different datasets available. We're quite excited about that.
Our wealth management business in general is our digital platform for our clients, our mobile platforms for our clients are all either cloud-enabled or moving to public cloud in the next year or two. A big shift. That business has made a big shift. Once we got our risk and control, comfort around that, we started to make a big pivot here. What we, what we've seen is even on the digital platforms, our, that's one of those groups where the number of releases have gone, you know, from months to weeks to days and hours at this point. Pretty exciting to be able to fix or, and, or deploy new capability to our clients in hours or days. With that entire business is really making an important pivot over the next couple of years.
Okay, interesting. Yeah, we actually did some work on wealth in 2.0, 3.0 last year, and it's good to hear that-
Yeah
You are leading the way.
We're trying, certainly.
On the flip side, it's been maybe a decade since I used the words, funds transfer. Was that it? transfer agent.
Transfer agent.
Transfer agent. I remember back a decade ago, we talked a lot about transfer agent, but I haven't in a while. Could you update us on what the opportunity set is there? I know it sounds a little niche-y, but it's interesting to hear these nuggets that are providing opportunity for you.
It's niche-y unless you like funds flowing in and out of the funds that everybody manages. If you want cash flowing in and out, it's pretty important. In that space, We codename everything. We've got a project name there that we've been working the last few years to really change what is a largely, pretty manual and one-off business right now, depending on who the fund manager is and how their clients get in and out of those funds. It's a complete digitization of that process. We've worked with a third part, you know, a partner on building this out.
I don't want to talk too much about it because we haven't sort of launched in market, but we're doing this with a few firms today, and it does allow individual investors to discover your fund, identify themselves and put money into your fund in minutes, basically. It's pretty exciting. It's got some caveats around Know Your Customer and all the other things that go around that source of cash, but it's meant to be as near straight through as can be. We're, like I said, we're not broadly out there with it, but we're excited to see that come to fruition and then see it start to spread around the world.
Started in Europe because of unique opportunity with some clients that wanted to build it along with us, and our business there was sizable enough to make it matter.
Okay, interesting. I don't want to leave Jason out of the conversation.
No, I'm fine.
I have one last question for Tom here on the topic of the year, maybe decade, AI, right? Maybe you could give us a sense as to how you're thinking about leveraging AI, and is this something that is near term, long term? Is it more revenue or expense? How should we be thinking about what it could do for you?
Yeah, it is impossible to go anywhere without talking about it. I know this isn't a tech audience, but I caution folks, if you get into tech audiences, we'll remember that the metaverse was the topic of the decade two years ago, and distributed ledger technology and blockchain was the topic of the decade two years or before that. There is, there's hype, and then there's what's substance at that point. AI feels, does feel more visceral and concrete in terms of its impacts than some of those other technologies. Faster. The curve on this thing is like something people have never seen before. In our business, it's funny you should bring this up.
I spent part of the plane ride here yesterday, formalizing some notes of conversations I'd had with our business leaders in all three of our businesses to talk about opportunities that I see in those, because I happen to have been with the company a long time. I know those businesses well, to see AI opportunities there. I can say they are both in the area of services, and I won't call them new businesses, but services and products we don't deliver today that might be possible with technology like this, those get a little bit of traction on people, but I don't think people have quite gotten their head around it because there's a lot of uncertainty on the technology's repeatability. If I ask it the same question two times in a row, can I get the same answer?
It's a pretty dicey proposition as an asset manager to say, "Well, I just ran a Monte Carlo, and it gave me two different answers in two minutes. What does that mean to me?" If that had been the case, we wouldn't use it. I think there are some top-line opportunities that are exciting, but I expect, like a lot of firms, that we're going to start to realize bottom line impacts first. I'll give you a few examples that are concrete. Most people don't want to talk about. I don't, we're not rolling anything, and there's no announcement here today. We're experimenting, like I think a lot of firms are. We've got a lot of guardrails by the way, our compliance and other folks are asking what the guardrails are around.
Our regulators are asking the same thing as they are, probably everybody else. We're in that experimentation phase right now in research. I can tell you right now, places where, and I heard some of you all say this earlier, it's really around language where the huge power is. There are places where language plays a large part in our servicing business right now. I talked about our wealth management business. A lot of the families and individuals we aim at have very complex financial lives, generally run by multiple layers of trust agreements and family partnership, operating agreements, things like that. These are not, you know, terse documents. These are very long documents, over a century or more, sometimes written by attorneys at the time.
They've got to be read and kind of dissected for what they really mean and what action we should take on behalf of that family. You could see a tool like this learning from our best fiduciary officers and trust attorneys to try and become the expert here. I see the same thing in our alternative fund services. You think about capital call letters and things like that. A lot of these things come as written narratives still.
Mm-hmm.
We provide a lot of those services, so helping us dissect and take action upon those. I also think there's a lot of client service that goes into this. You know, one of our differentiators being client service. I think the ability to look through every call report, go through every recorded phone call, you know, those kinds of things I think are really powerful in both, you know, client servicing units. Lastly, I think the group that approached me first to sort of lift some of our restrictions on this was our asset management business. You know, everything from basic equity research to fund sentiment and dialogues on this, on the fund service center and places like that.
There's places where language matters, and we're either selling, you know, in taking it to make investment decisions or selling our own thoughts and sentiments on things. You know, it doesn't take long to scratch the surface where there's things that take us hours and days, that could take minutes or come to you synthesized already, that are pretty powerful. Nonetheless, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, I do think these play a powerful role in the IT groups of most large organizations. I talked about quality assurance and things like that because I think that's easy in the near term, but I'd be lying if I said this wasn't going to be writing, you know, cybersecurity defense scripts for us intuitively, helping us write better code, more, you know, efficient code, and eventually becoming.
You know, if you've got a people that are young, I've got a college student in cybersecurity uses it to write half of the code for him before he starts an assignment. The universities and educational institutions are largely encouraging this. Most of the new talent coming to our organizations in the IT center are going to be used to using these tools as accelerators, and if we don't have them.
Right.
They're going to be looking as a pretty ancient-looking organization to them just in a few years. Big things afoot on the, on the bottom line returns, and I think big opportunities as yet unquantified on the top line.
Is that something that I should think you will be benefiting from over, say, a 3-year time horizon, or is that more, you know, like 5 to 10?
Oh, I think most firms. I think understanding the technology, if we can get around the repeatability and manageability of this, I think, three it'd be near in on the bottom line in some things. Yeah, I think we're doing some experimentation. We'd like to see show returns in the next 12 to 18 months. Again, my third caveat on this, a lot of risk and regulatory and control work to do around this.
Right.
I think it's an industry.
Yeah, totally get the point that you have other people you have to please before you execute, but, you know, if it was just you and your mousetrap, and you could start delivering expense results even sooner.
Probably. That's right.
Yeah.
I just think it's important to note, because I just, I named off a couple of other technologies that were the thing at one time in the last three or four years. I never had any of those where people in our businesses were calling me saying: "Can you give me open access to this thing and give me some data I can use?" Nobody was doing that on distributed ledger technology. They didn't understand it, and it was probably true of the metaverse in a lot of ways, and I could go through others. This is the first one where businesses are pushing tech much like, they want access, and they want to start playing around with this. I think that's a good sign in terms of the curve staying steep, even in highly regulated industries.
Are they responsible for any of that tech budget that they're asking you to engage in?
You know, that's interesting that you make that point. In terms of the change agenda, more than half of that is the businesses determine what they get spent on.
Okay.
They ask for advice, but they don't always take it, but they certainly ask for it. I think it's really. Well, again, when we talked about differentiators, we can talk about a long list of more subtle ones. The fact that the businesses direct so much of the change budget.
Mm.
Tells me that if they see promise, this will be an area that as their general contractor, I've got to become very adept in, which is why we're doing so.
Okay, great. Well, that's a super, not walkthrough, but just real in-depth understanding of how Northern Trust is impacting business with the technology investments you're making. You know, there's obviously a huge partnership there that came to life today. Appreciate that. Jason, over to you for just how you're thinking about this tech investment spend, how you manage that within the context of the overall operating leverage goals that you have for Northern Trust. Maybe we could get even a little more pedantic and talk about the quarter.
Yeah. Well, yeah, this is much more interesting than Basel III endgame. I think you can tell Tom and I spend a lot of time together. My view on this is that if you think about where even, Betsy, you and my roles were 10 or 15 years ago, we didn't have to know about technology as much, and I didn't want to just come at this saying, "Spend less, spend less, spend less." Tom's a teacher to me first, and we work really closely together, thinking about how technology's going to be part of Northern Trust and our overall ecosystem going forward. It's our second-biggest cost. We spend over $1 billion a year, and so we have to be good at it.
Frankly, our clients are asking. It's a big part of how we engage with clients, and so it's very much woven into the fabric of what we're thinking about strategically for the company. That said, we also have to be very careful about the spend around it.
Mm-hmm.
Make sure that we're doing what we should do and what's appropriate, but that we're prudent in the pacing and the depth and scope of what we do.
Okay. You have room in the budget for it?
We have to, and I think the last few years, it's been higher than what it will be five years from now in terms of growth rate. As Tom did even get into some of it, we got a lot accomplished over the last few years in an era where a lot of things were demanded of us to take place. Another thing we didn't talk about, we have to have technology that's consistent with our brand.
Mm.
Our brand is about integrity, it's about resiliency, it's about meeting client needs. This is what we've got to ensure as part of the technology, not just technology budget, but the execution of it.
Okay. All right, appreciate that.
Yeah.
In our last couple of minutes here, maybe we could just talk a little bit about anything you're seeing in the quarter specifically that you want to update us on?
Yeah, I'll be short. There are two things that as I think about the income statement and look at the forecast, jump out. One is, and it was ironic to hear Eric talk about it an hour ago, but capital markets activity is light. Foreign exchange trading is light. Instead of just giving it a 100-foot example, but through the first two months of the quarter, $32 million in total, that compares to low 50s at the end of last quarter, trending to be less than what it was in first quarter. We think that's very largely, and it was echoed or pre-echoed by Eric. It's very much about activity in the marketplace, but light. Two, balance sheet. Always of interest to people lately, volumes are still strong.
It's similar to the April earnings call, where we indicated that deposits were about $105 billion at that point. Hung in very well since then, in a good way. Very good client activity and hung in around that level since then. I'll say also, costs of deposits, very high. Just the competition level for deposits is very high. A lot of phone calls from clients saying, "I want to leave my deposits there, but this is what I'm hearing from three other institutions." In some instances, we're saying, "Sounds great," but in some instances, we're saying, "We want to keep that in the house." There's going to be a pressure on NIM there. Overall, volume's good, cost is high.
Okay. Your non-interest expense target for full year 2023, just on that front, anything there?
Yeah. Productivity Office is getting off the ground well. It's continuing to focus on the pillars that we've talked about. They get to, even some of the things Tom talked about, the vendor strategy, vendor engagement. Tom and I are spending a lot of time together talking about how do we consolidate and ensure that we've got good productivity from a vendor perspective. Secondly, workforce analytics. Our largest. The only thing bigger than technology cost is our labor cost.
Mm.
We've got to ensure that we've got the right people, the right number, right places, at the right cost. The third thing is investment governance, and that doesn't get to how are we investing in the stock market. It's analyzing the investments we're making in the business, and that can be capital, but it can also be expense investments, where we've got projects, initiatives, small areas of the company that aren't at the margin or returns that we want, making sure we're pushing on those faster or saying, "Maybe we shouldn't be doing this and pursuing it at this point in time." Lastly, in general, the thing we've been talking about for the last half hour, specifically around technology and making sure that we're doing all the right things there.
I feel really good, frankly, about non-interest expense and how the Productivity Office has gotten off the ground. More to come on that, but feel like good early traction.
All right. Well, that's a great update. Thanks so much, Jason and Tom. Thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Betsy.
Thank you.