Congratulations on your wins at Global Custodian’s Leaders in Custody awards. What – for you – were the contributing factors behind the successful year that led to these awards?
Our goal has always been to help deliver better outcomes for our clients. Custody is at the core of what we do, and our dedication to improving the client experience iteratively is constant across our custody operations. There are four key contributing factors that have led to our success this year:
1. One State Street approach: At State Street, we’re evolving beyond our traditional role as a custody service provider to become a true enterprise partner. While custody may be considered a commodity business, we view it as an important component of the back office and a driver of growth. What sets us apart is our commitment to delivering end-to-end value through a front-to-back approach, with an overall focus on service excellence.
2. Strengthening our core solutions: We are strengthening our core custody capabilities through investments designed to enhance our operating model and the global support we provide to our clients. We’ve shifted from a reactive to a proactive approach.
3. Harnessing fintech: The advent of new FinTech tools enables us to accelerate our digitisation efforts, build out an interoperable ecosystem that allows better collaboration across the chain of custody from the agents, issuers, clients and our teams, and also promote more transparency. This shift not only enhances transparency, but also boosts straight-through-processing – freeing up our operational teams to focus on high- value tasks and client service excellence.
4. Advancing data delivery: We have transitioned to a cloud-native data platform that harmonises data from our source platforms in near real-time and delivers consistent high-quality data to our clients via our mystatestreet client portal and application programming interfaces (APIs).
This is an ongoing journey for us, and we remain committed to continuous improvement.
Could you outline some of the main achievements and milestones from the year?
This year has been a significant one for the advancement of our strategy with a series of tangible milestones for the business. In response to client feedback about ways we can work more closely on meeting their needs by introducing new AI-based technology solutions for client inquiry management, we addressed a substantial backlog of client reporting requests and improved client self-service capabilities on our mystatestreet 2.0 platform.
Key achievements include:
1. Migration to Proxymity for proxy voting, enhancing transparency and connectivity.
2. Smart Desktops for operational teams, streamlining workflows and enabling context-driven navigation across income and transaction management.
3. Persona-Based Dashboards in MyStateStreet, tailored to client roles and needs.
4. Data-as-a-Service offerings via APIs and Alpha, expanding access to actionable insights.
5. ISO 20022 Readiness for cash messaging, ensuring compliance ahead of the November 2025 deadline.
6. Securities Valuation Engine, providing enhanced pricing data and coverage as part of custody position reporting
How do you plan to build on this success going into the rest of the year and beyond?
To ensure we keep momentum going, we have outlined a series of strategic upgrades that we plan to accomplish in the next few years.
1. Accelerating Market Access: Supporting clients through regulatory shifts such as T+1 in Europe and ISO 20022 adoption, while expanding access to new and complex markets.
2. Investing in the Core: Continued investment in standardisation, omni-channel data delivery, platform consolidation, and operating model simplification.
3. Innovating for the Future: Developing capabilities for real-time insights and digital asset investments, including leveraging distributed ledger technology to meet evolving client needs
As we continue to advance our strategy, we remain committed to delivering value to our clients through innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Our journey is ongoing, and we are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.