Great. Moving right along, very pleased to have Northern Trust with us this morning. If we could put up the first ARS question that we've been asking everyone. We got, you know, Jason, who's been a regular participant at this conference, CFO. We have Peter returning, was here, I think, last kind of right before COVID, who runs their asset servicing unit. So we try to kind of balance the conversation between, you know, Pete's world and Jason's world. You know, Pete, maybe begin with you. President of Asset Servicing, I think $13.5 trillion in assets under custody and administration. One trillion AUM, it's like 60% of the company's revenue.
So obviously a very, very big business and driver of a lot of the stuff that Jason talks about. Maybe we could start big picture in terms of kind of what you're hearing, seeing from your clients against this dynamic backdrop.
Sure. You know, I'll start off with I've seen a lot of clients over the last six months globally, and number one is clients actually wanna see you in person. So business is back, we're traveling, and that's great to see. They're under a lot of pressure, and the pressure for returns, the pressure to reduce cost, the pressure from consolidation, be it in the pension industry consolidation or Asset Management. So a lot of things that they're grappling with, and those present, frankly, opportunities for us. Because as they look at their costs, they look at what they do, what they should outsource, we can sit down and help provide those solutions to them. Beyond that, they're looking for resiliency.
They wanna make sure the regulatory environment continues to increase in this macro environment we have, and they wanna make sure that you're resilient, that you've invested enough in cyber, that you've invested enough in your technology stability, et cetera. So doing all that, providing good service, that's what they want.
Can you maybe just expand upon maybe your strategy for asset servicing, you know, how you're differentiating yourself from peers, and just maybe how you've been doing in the marketplace against them?
Sure. Outside of the macro, what I tell our board, strategy is simple, scalable growth. So we need to grow, and we need to grow in a scalable method. And we talk about expense to trust fees and things like that. So you have to focus on the expense line, and you have to focus on the top line. Our industry is really a situation where you provide a commodity product combined with sophisticated solutions. And where we end up winning is when we can do that better than the competition, right? And the commodities, you got to do that a cost-effective way, but that sophisticated solution and that service around that, that is our differentiator. The other thing we do is we, our strategy is One Northern. So we go out, and we win a client, then we try to cross-sell everything.
That cross-sell can include all the capital markets businesses, it includes, Asset Management business. That ability to diversify our revenue from one stream to the others is very, very important. Next, digitize. Our business has to be digitized as we go forward. We think about productivity. The problem with our strategy is we, we win because of client service, but client service means that you do some special things for clients that may be bespoke, et cetera. We have to be better than the competition at digitizing that customized solution for our clients. So a lot of effort going in in terms of taking all of the new tools that are available, AI, et cetera, and making sure that all of this can be automated.
Got it. And if we look, you know, I guess assets under custody, asset servicing fees have, you know, both increased into the last two quarters. Obviously, some benefits from the market there. I know you speak to in the past, kind of mid-single digit organic growth. Can you talk to, you know, what, you know, what you're doing to kind of drive that growth and kind of maybe some of your near-term, medium-term expectations?
Sure. I'll start off with one thing I think is unique about us is that we're split equally in revenues between asset owners, so your pension funds, your not-for-profits, et cetera, and asset managers. So about 50/50. That enables us to go to market, really selling to both, client bases. And what we're trying to do there is really look at the combination of the alternatives and the public assets. So if we think of one of the big trends that's out in the industry right now, is continuing to be the purchasing of alternative assets, be it private equity, private credit, et cetera. How that's manifesting itself in the Asset Management area is our ability to sell more fund administration to private equity, private credit funds, right?
In Ireland, in the U.S., and Luxembourg, and that is growing faster than our average across our business. And you're an asset owner. You wanna see your public assets and your private assets all together in one view, and you wanna do risk and performance. And we have built a system that does that for us, called Front Office Solutions, and that has been a differentiator for the asset owner community on a global basis. So those two things, right, are really important. The last thing, all about data. So we've built a new data warehouse, won some awards for that. And what clients want, clients want their data when they want it, how they want it. But the ability to us to take all of our data, throw it into Snowflake account, Azure, whatever, enable the clients to grab it via APIs.
If they still want FTP, God love them, we'll do FTP. Whatever they want, we can deliver that data, and that's the key back to that synergies and back to that ability to make sure that no manual is between us, just the data going out.
I guess on the July earnings call, Mike noted that asset servicing pipeline remains robust. Maybe just give us more color, you know, where it's coming from, you know, custody and fund administration, middle office, front office, any traffic differences. And then just maybe, you know, who in the marketplace, who are those?
Yeah. So, first of all, I think I do need to just step back for a second and talk about growth. When we talk about organic growth, organic growth is really, for us, made up of many different things. One is the pipeline, right? So we have to win, we have new business coming in. But the other half of organic growth comes from transaction fees, our transactions going up and down as we go to market. It comes from flows from our asset managers, it comes from withdrawals from large pension plans or, inputs from the large pension plans, et cetera. So you need to think of organic growth in two buckets. So on the pipeline, where it's coming from, really two places. If you think about the asset manager group, and the asset managers, it's really selling all of our services.
So for example, just one big client in the U.K., where they bought everything. They bought custody, they bought fund administration, our middle office, FX and share class hedging, right? All the whole works. That is the goal for us. If we can get that all onto our platform, we'll continue to grow them. On the asset owner side, there was just an article out there. We won Nebraska, and so, mid-size U.S. pension, great. We won that because of our Front Office Solutions product and that ability to combine the alternatives and the publics and present that performance in one manner that's good for them. That worked well.
But what's really unique there is we ended up winning a bunch of Asset Management as well, and so on the beta side and liquidity side, and bundling all that up as one offering and One Northern, definitely a way we can drive revenues for the asset owner community.
I guess one of the things, you know, that people will look at, you know, you kind of look at the, you know, AUC rankings, and there's, you know, maybe three big competitors, and then Northern is down a little bit. Can we just talk to, d oes that, are there maybe advantages or disadvantages of that in terms of, you know, size and just how that factors into, you know, how you operate the business?
Yeah. So how do you define scale? So do you define scale because you have more assets under custody? If your assets are all U.S. equities, I, I'm very efficient with U.S. equities, someone can have 10 trillion more in U.S. equities. It's not giving them a scale pricing advantage at all. All right? You get scale by how good are you at actually being on one platform. You know, do you have 15 accounting engines or do you have one or two? How are you running as-- For us, if I look at our derivatives processing, our derivatives processing runs on one platform, regardless of whether you've bought middle office, you've bought fund accounting, you've bought custody, or you're in the hedge fund group. It's all on one platform. So when someone out here creates a new derivative, we're building it once.
That's scale gotten intelligently, not scale, just size. I really need to stress that, and that's how we compete.
And then maybe just you mentioned pricing. You know, pricing pressure in these businesses seems to be a recurring theme. Let me just talk to in terms of what you're seeing, any changes?
Yeah, it's, it's tough, right? There is definitely a lot of pricing conversations that happen out there. We're in a business where, you know, if you're a public funds, they have to go out every certain amount of time. There's a lot of consolidation on the Asset Management side. That's providing more opportunity for them to go to market and let's bundle. Markets go up, you know, managers say, "Hey, you gotten paid a lot more. You know, let me, let me talk about repricing, potentially." What's good now is that if I go back to pre-2008, and I don't know if everybody realized how custody banks, trust banks made money. Everyone knows now. So you can sit down and have a conversation of, "All right, so where are your balances? Where, where is your FX done? Are you doing trading with us?
What are you doing?" And we can have a conversation in the round and make sure we're getting enough revenue. And that's really what we do. So I don't care how we get paid, I just need to get paid. And so we do have many of those conversations that are happening.
Then I was wondering, can we just talk to the competitive landscape? We had one of your peers here yesterday, from Boston. I won't say who it was. But they actually showed how they-
Maybe my alma mater.
They showed how they've been kind of losing markets here, particularly in U.S. Asset Servicing, over the last two years, and then talked about efforts they're going out to kind of rehiring or not rehiring, but hiring more, RMs and trying to step up their game there. We can just talk to in terms of naming names, but kind of the overall competitive landscape.
Yeah. So clients want service. You know, we've, as we've gone through our, you know, actions and things like that, we have not cut into our relationship management teams, our client service teams, because clients want individuals to pick up the phone that understand them and that can service them. That's key. And so what others are, I think, realizing is you have to do that, and so they're going ahead and, you know, rehiring and compete as we go forward. But, you know, if I think about where we are as an organization, I think we're pretty good in the sales sector, pretty good in the relationship team. What we have to do is continue to focus. So I cannot sit down and compete in every single jurisdiction, for example, that my competitors compete in.
So, to give you an example, I'm not in Taiwan, I'm not in Japan. We're not going, right? We can't, we can't afford to do that. It's not in the cards. So we have to sit down and say, "If we can be number one, two, or three in a market, let's go, and we'll stay in that market and, and, and correctly invest and build the teams locally." trying to build that up. If we can't get to that position, you know, do we really want to be there, or, or should we do something different?
Got it. And then, I know Northern hasn't been a very active acquirer over the years, but, you know, there's SunGard reporting looking to sell. It's close to the union. I think there's kind of others on the potentially out there. Just maybe talk about, you know, how acquisitions can play a role in your world.
It's funny because, no, we haven't been a big acquirer, but most of them have been in my business. You know, right now, I would say we don't need scale for scale's sake. So our goal is not to just say, "Okay, we need to add another 7 trillion in assets, let's go and put them on our system." What we will do is continue to see if there is a bolt-on acquisition that makes sense from a capability or a jurisdictional perspective. So if there's something that pops up, this is a jurisdiction we're not in, okay, we would consider that and look at that. You know, that's frankly what we did with UBS. Right? And so now, you know, number one in Switzerland, we keep driving that. Right? That's going forward.
Chips are falling in the right place there, for us, so that's good. So we'll continue to look at that, but it's really a one-off basis as we continue to grow organically as the primary strategy.
And Jason, maybe we kind of bring you into the conversation. We obviously talked a lot about asset servicing so far. Maybe talk to just general trends you're seeing in Wealth Management or Asset Management. I know there's been some changes there.
Sure. Well, first of all, congratulations on the conference. I mean, there's a lot of people. It seems like attendance is up and a lot of good commentary coming out of yesterday. I missed being here, so congratulations. If we transition and talk about maybe Asset Management first, because there's actually some interesting, exciting moves that have happened there for people that follow the company closely. Daniel Gamba joined as president of that business from BlackRock in April, and he's got great experience in Asset Management. He's run different businesses in different areas: institutional, more retail, active, passive. And so he understands product and client and manufacturing really, really well, and he's already made some changes and focused the business.
I think the best thing you can see externally is he's just geographically and product-wise super focused on where we can win. And he always he talks all the time about we have to invest where we have a right to win. And he's it's when everybody that comes away from talking about him takes that away. And so I think you'll see the business more focused on areas where we've got competitive advantage, where we have access, where we have good product. And the Asset Management business is hard, but I we all feel excited about his leadership. And you think about areas for us, like cash indexing and then even customized indexing. We call it Tax-Advantaged Equity.
A lot of what we do in the Wealth Management business for the upper market that wants more beta exposure, but wants to manage taxes more efficiently, we've done really well in that area, a lot of assets. And so I think in a lot of different areas of that business, you'll see us investing and getting more focused. So it's exciting for us. And then in the Wealth Management business, the momentum that we've been talking about over the last couple quarters, it's continuing. And as I look at the numbers, it just strikes me over and over again, the upper end of the market, we do better.
I can look at the tiering and look at $5 million and below, $5-$25 million, $25-$100 million, $100 million plus, the family office business. And the higher the tier you go, the better our market share, the better, and the better the growth in the company. And so it. I think that's reflective of where the brand is and where our top people are, and that family office business is. It sits right in the middle of all of our capabilities, and so they work a lot with Pete in asset servicing. Their clients use us a lot for that, but more and more, we're engaging with them on advice and on A sset Management, and so a lot of new things going on in the wealth business too.
Got it. And maybe we can have them delve into some of the financials.
Um-
That was the transition one.
I like, y eah, you mentioned the word investing, so that got me thinking.
Yep, there you go.
We'll get the expenses in a little bit, but maybe start with deposits.
Yeah.
You know, in mid-July, I think you kind of threw out $106 billion, you know, which were down from quarter end, but kind of in line with 2Q's average. Although I know August tends to be seasonally soft, maybe just speak to kind of current mix trends, cost trends, and, you know, maybe talk to what you're seeing to the institutional channel, the wealth channel.
Yeah. Actually, I can, I can, I can give a little color on, on both channels. I think the headlines with people is the deposits have held in very well, and certainly in line with what we, with what we anticipated. And this would be a tough part in the 90, in the 92-day cycle coming off of August, but even with that, deposits are, are, are holding in well. It's clear to me, when given a choice, clients will, they just prefer to be on our balance sheet, and that, that's continued. And ironically. So August was soft. It was. We anticipate that. It was as soft as we anticipated it to be, but the trends in deposits to tell then overall, just as we would've, just as we would've thought so far during the quarter.
To separate the businesses, the wealth business is actually, it's smaller, and so you can't overread. You don't overinterpret this, but the deposits are actually up a little bit in, in wealth. And so that was a, was a pleasant surprise to, to see that. And, you know, part of that's probably just the resiliency and, and the fact that they're not spending as, as much in the, in the summer months. There's probably a little bit less volatility there. And the, in the asset servicing business, we've seen a, a very slight decline, again, all within the range that we talked about. But again, it's, it's been highly anticipated. It's just, it, the competition and spreads are tough there. So just answering a lot of phone calls and talking about what we should, you know, how, how we're thinking about maintaining spread.
Any, I guess, thoughts in terms of kind of mix or cost?
Yeah. So costs are up, and, you know, we, coming at the end of second quarter, we felt good about where about cost pressure. We knew it was coming, but it hadn't really hit hard. In the third quarter, it's hit very hard, and it's less us going out and aggressively trying to bring deposits in. It's just us saying, "When in doubt, we are going to hold on to the deposits inside the house." And so we said that the overall NII would be down in the 5% range. It looks like it's going to be closer to 10% down for the quarter. And again, that's not on volume, that's just.
That's all on spread, and just us defending, and, and we feel good about what we're, what we're doing, but that's the implication of it in the short run. We can. It's too early to talk in any detail about fourth quarter, but there are pros and cons to what that will look like. And the pros are, we still, we still have securities that are maturing from pre-rate rises, and so we're still getting a lift from that. And at the same time, we'll, we'll have more of a full quarter of the rate rise reflected on the asset side, less on the liability side. So some pros, but then we'll see what happens with the, with, with spread pressure there as well. But certainly don't see anything close to a, a 10% decline in fourth quarter.
So all right, we were down 4% in Q2. We were thinking down 5% in Q3, and now we're thinking it's really going to be down 10%. You mentioned being a bit more aggressive in terms of pricing deposits, on the interest-bearing front, and I guess that's the biggest driver as opposed to maybe mix shift out of non-interest bearing?
It's a little bit, a very small decline in non-interest bearing. But just from what I am seeing, more anecdotal clients saying, "We want to stay there. We're just looking at what our rate options are, whether it's at your peers or money market funds or elsewhere, and this is where we see the market. Will you match it?" And in some instances, we are. And it takes time, too. The timing of that decision and the conversation of, "Well, we need to get paid on the other side," that doesn't happen overnight. So you make sure people stay on the balance sheet, you price what the market is, then you can have another conversation that says, "Okay, now what's the total revenue we're getting from you?" But that can take months or so to go through and have that conversation.
There is a mismatch in timing as we go forward.
And so I guess, you know, it, it's the reason I'll follow up is it's, we've heard something maybe a little bit different from some of the other banks in terms of, you know, maybe the NII underperformed kind of first half of the year, and now they're kind of seeing stabilization. So from an interest, do you think you're kind of maybe we're a little bit behind in terms of kind of raising pricing, or is this kind of the next leg of another repricing higher as rates are now elevated for a prolonged period of time?
My interpretation is that we were a little behind in feeling spread compression. Because if you look at the results and where I, you know, I don't talk about others' guidance a lot. I just don't follow it that obsessively, but I think the results are going to be close to the same. The results might be closer to similar. I think it just has to do with who was feeling it at one point and was able to communicate it at different points. But from my sense is that it really is more timing and there's nothing idiosyncratic. And again, it's not, you know.
The conversations I'm having with clients and with the field and Pete's team and Steve Fradkin's team, everybody's coming back saying: "Look, the spreads are just tight, and how do we want to, how do we want to handle it? Do we want to hold on to these or let them go?" And for when rates were going up, when rates were coming down in the beginning of the health crisis, we said, "Our bias is going to be hold, to hold on to the deposits." And it's the same thing now.
All right, so then down less than 10 for Q4, I won't pinpoint on a number. We'll wait till October. But, you know, as we kind of begin to think about 2024, you have a really short-duration balance sheet. You know, maybe there's room to extend duration, you know, pick up some NII. How do you just kind of - how should we start to think about 2024?
I don't even think duration gets to how short the balance sheet is, because I think it undersells the fact that. So, we don't have 70% of the assets in the securities portfolio. It's actually, you know, $40 billion-$50 billion on a $130+ billion, you know, balance sheet. It's actually not that large. And then you look at the loan book in particular, and the duration there is a year or less. And then we run a really high cash position with the duration, obviously, of zero. And so you add it all together, I think about it in terms of the overall balance sheet duration. And so you weighted it. If you average those out and weight them, you get to a balance sheet duration that's really low.
And frankly, if there are lessons coming out of what's happened in the volatility of deposits over the last couple of years, the lesson is shorter is better. And we're still able to generate really good returns for shareholders. I mean, if we're staying in a 10%-15% return on equity range and also able to not do uncomfortable things, then it puts us in a really good position. And it's a—I think it's another reason why our clients, all things equal, say we'd prefer to be on Northern Trust's balance sheet. And so not looking to change that significantly to go grab extra NII, and feel like it's the right thing for a variety of reasons to stay overall positioned the way we are.
Things will change in the market and put the different dynamics at play, but we felt good about where the positioning was, especially through the volatility that took place over the last couple of years.
Got it. And then maybe shifting to the fee income side, markets have been good, activity, volatility, maybe not so good. Just maybe any color on the performance there?
Actually, do you want to—I mean, a lot of the trading activity has been light, and that doesn't show up in dramatic changes to our income statement. It's just, i t's something that we observe and look at and talk about. So I don't think it's noteworthy if you're thinking about the long-term earnings of the company at this point, but the transaction activity inside the business has been volatile. It was—we had a good quarter last quarter. It's been more normalized this quarter so far, so wouldn't say anything significant to note. Anything you want to add, Pete?
Yeah, I would agree. And the other point is, while our brokerage business is not a huge number across, right now, across the company, that's getting larger, right? And that as well, transactions impact that. Again, as you look at it, we've added a lot of clients, but you're kind of running fast to stand still on that side. Then, I guess on the earnings call, as one of the highlights was, you know, you kind of talking to expenses up 6% or less for 2023 versus up 7% or less for prior. I guess maybe just talk to any kind of updated thoughts there, in light of maybe revenues may even be a bit softer than we thought.
Yeah. The frankly, not connected to NII, and the actions we've taken in the Productivity Office have been good, and we've continued to execute on those well. They're taking hold well. And so, as we came into the year, looking at what fourth quarter looked like and looking at, you know, some lenses on first quarter, we saw 7 as a possibility, and so we've got to do better than that. And we said six has got to be, a nd then we said, "You know, we had a good first quarter, had a good second quarter," and so, and that's continuing. And so we feel good that we can, for the second half of the year, still have a 6% or better, and our confidence around that is even higher than it was as we talked in July.
A lot of that is the things that we've launched and are able to control are, again, taking hold. It's the comp line that we've got to make sure we can keep an eye on closely. The actions that we mentioned in January, the ones we talked about in July, we've been able to execute on those at a good pace. So specifically on comp, we mentioned that we'd have that the comp line would be flat to down, and at this point, this far in the quarter, we can see that line is going to be. I don't think it'll be interpreted as flat. I think it'll be interpreted as down, and so feeling more confidence about the execution of those programs.
Got it. There's more stuff on expenses I want to get to, but I want to make sure we touch on capital first.
Yeah.
So I'm going to come back to that. But, if we could just put up the next, ARS question. You know, Basel III Endgame proposal, maybe just talk to the potential impact for Northern. I know, you know, not a ton of market risk relative to the big banks, not a ton of credit risk. Operational risk is something, you know, new in the standardized approaches. I think we just talk about the impact and how you think about it.
Yeah. Well, I think people are getting it mostly right in their overall assumptions of what the impact will be for us. That, and you framed it well. There's operational risk, which is going to have, obviously, an upward impact for us. And then there's multiple components of lending that will, that'll have impact, and those will generally go in our favor. And ironically, I think relative to peers, we tend to have more direct lending, and so that might be more beneficial for us. And our weight of operational within our overall business is less than some people, I think, sometimes remember. And so at a headline level, our RWA should be up 10%-15%, so wanted to give people a chance to vote to see-
They got it right.
They got it right. So that's good. But in general, if you think about our capital levels, we run a lot of room, and so don't think it's gonna have dramatic impact on how we manage capital at this point.
I guess on that notion, right, you, you over 11% CET1 manageable or RWA inflation over a period of time. You opted not to increase the dividend this year, modest buyback. Just how do you kind of think about-
Yeah
Capital management from here?
Yeah. That 30%-50% dividend payout ratio, you know, that may go out, you know, outside that range for short periods of time. It's not like we're gonna, you know, panic and do anything, but in general, our earnings are relatively stable and predictable, given the recurring nature of the revenue. And so I think that's something people should really focus on in terms of our dividend policy. And then you look past that, and it really is. We do look carefully at where a broad set of peers are from a CET1 perspective, and so that matters.
Part of it is that Pete's office is literally right next to mine, and he'll pop over, I'll go over, and he'll say, "I'm going to Asia to visit with clients, and what are the talking points that we should be using about the balance sheet?" We take pride in it, and we think it's part of our differentiated story to talk about where we are. So again, it doesn't need to be there every single quarter, but in general, based on where we see people moving and where they're saying they're going to go with capital, we wanna have a strong story there. So that's the second dynamic. Then from a share repurchase perspective, a lot of these dynamics come into play.
We've got a, we've got a big FDIC bill coming, and so that's the kind of thing that we weigh in and say: Okay, do you take a quarter off in order to just get that done without impacting capital? And what are the options that we have to reinvest inside the business to, and we think about the stock just as we think about other investments that we can make. And so all of these things play in. You cannot overread, you cannot, you shouldn't overinterpret our actions in any one quarter as an indication that one of those is blinking bright green or bright red, but that is literally how we think about it on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
Got it. All right, now I want to just pivot back to expenses. You know, you talked about that 6% or less number for 2023. You talked about this office of productivity earlier this year, I think, unveiled that, which is obviously proven to have some initial success. As you kind of get into the 2024 budget process, do you think you can improve on that 6%, or kind of just where are you in this productivity journey?
So first, we should not have our long-term run rate be 6% expense growth. That is not good. So we will plan for the company over time to be doing better than that. So that's most important from what you said, that jumped out. That's not the financial model, and people should know that. We're extremely committed to a financial model that has less than 6% expense growth, period. The Productivity Office just improves the opportunity for us to do that very consistently. And the three things that are in my mind most foremost are one, workforce, because again, it's our biggest cost. We've taken significant actions this year to reduce costs that were supposed to be.
We, we absorbed in large ways the base pay increase that we did. So, and we're doing, w e're much more analytical about how we're addressing the workforce. And so I think that's been really strong, and there are a lot of things that are in play there. As we think about bringing on new people, it's, it's much more quantitative and analytical to think about where should they come, at what rate. Pete and I and our teams work super closely on that and feel really good about how that's been launched. And I, and that's a big-- that's been a win so far, frankly. And second is vendor management. And, you know, we, we spend, we spend a lot of money with contractors, with vendors in general, and so we have to get that right.
Ensuring that we're negotiating well, getting proper rebates, ensuring third party, third-party hiring is done right, is done right, super essential. I think the evolution of that is maturing as well. We've had good negotiations, good conversations with results on some of our largest vendors, and we're involved in very senior levels on that. I am, Pete is, others directly in those conversations. Then the third is IT capital, and that one, I think, is less far along in the evolution of what we're doing within the Productivity Office, but also another really important item. We spend over $1 billion a year total in technology, and that's been the highest growth rate area for us over the last 10 years.
Now that it's bigger, it has to be managed that much better and fully committed to making sure that we're doing that too.
So maybe what is the right way to think about it? It's not--it's something less than 6%. You did a 25% pre-tax margin last quarter at 116% expense-to-trust fee ratio. You know, is there a kind of--what do you have in mind is the proper metrics for this operating model?
Yeah, yeah. We think about them all the time. So 5%-10% expense-to-trust fee ratio, we're not there now, but, you know— As I start looking at 2024 and beyond, I'm looking really closely at the same question other people are asking: When can we get inside that range? It's really important for us to be inside that range for us to perform well as a company. And then also just top line, the revenue growth number, and we've got to be able to do something a couple hundred basis points above GDP. And then we have internally, there's one area you can't see, but we're looking at organic growth— organic trust fee growth rate targets as well. And then that pre-tax margin of 30% is, in the short run, it's going to be a tough one to get to.
We layered on some expenses in the company as a result of the health crisis and as a result of inflation. It's going to take us a while to grow and get to that. And then lastly, that return on equity, 10%-15%, to me, that's the fundamental component, and there's no reason for us to change. That's the one that we start with when we talk about performance internally. That's the biggest litmus test that we have for the institution.
I guess while you still have the mic, any other comments from the quarters we tore up our models?
No.
All right, any questions from the audience? We can go to the next IR question because you guys are shy. Let's see what this is. All right, so this is topical, just what we're talking about. But where do you see Northern's expense to trust fee, not trust fee ratio in 2024?
Yeah, I'd love to end by giving a really specific answer. The reality is that our model is really, t he revenue model is driven a lot by macro factors. And so, you know, if you had on there, you know, given a specific increase or rate for equity markets, then it'd be easier to answer. But the reality is, where we end this year in the S&P and EAFE is a really big indicator for that. I do think directionally, yeah, it's going to be, b arring a significant increase in the S&P and EAFE, hard for us to get down to $115 next year. But you hear the commitment we have to getting there as well.
So it's not just. We think a lot about what's the financial model, the financial algorithm for the company, and we feel like getting to that 110-115 is important. It enables us to be a high performance company and to be able to grow EPS at a good sustainable rate.
I would add, just from a cultural change perspective, you know, I have two-thirds of the people in my organization, and every two weeks, I'm personally approving any add to staff that would come into that group, and scrubbing in and questions, et cetera. So there is a very high hurdle now to add teams, add staff, et cetera. And when we do, it's like, where's the productivity offset on the other side? Because if we win a lot of business, which we're winning, we want to add new relationship managers, new client service folks, so we need productivity on the other side in order to fund that.
That's on a base of 14,000 people with high turnover in some areas, so that's where a lot of the demand comes from.
Okay. On that note, please join me in thanking Jason, Pete, for their time today.