State Street’s Global Delivery group manages the organization’s custody, accounting, alternatives, middle-office, transfer agency, and client service operations. From our offices around the world, our team of approximately 20,000 employees seamlessly delivers integrated solutions that help clients enter new markets, find additional sources of growth and innovation, better leverage increasing volumes of data, and meet regulatory obligations.

In 2021, we further enhanced and simplified our end-to-end operating model to support our resiliency and business growth, increasing operational efficiency while maintaining a robust risk management protocol.

We focused on simplification to improve the scalability and configurability of our operating environment and made significant progress in further digitizing our process flows, enhancing our control environment, introducing new cybersecurity risk mitigation measures, and implementing additional data and operational safeguards.

STRENGTHENING OUR CAPABILITIES

Technology and cyber are critical pillars of our Global Delivery operations, providing a strong foundation for our multiple processing centers around the world.

In 2021, we expanded our Global Technology and Cyber teams, adding seasoned experts in core competencies including cybersecurity, cloud engineering, and global payments, to strengthen our capabilities and boost our technology execution capacity.

Throughout the year, we continued to embed additional multilayered defenses to minimize risk, protect sensitive data, and meet compliance obligations. We enhanced our framework to deliver controlled, intelligence-led cybersecurity tests and progressed our resiliency programs.

We also established a new production management function and enhanced our business continuity capabilities for applications supporting our most critical business services.

ADVANCING PROCESS AUTOMATION

Automation continued to deliver strong benefits in key areas of Global Delivery. Notably, our efforts to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have helped us create enhanced predictive benchmarks of net asset value (NAV) performance, which is now available for more than 17,000 funds.

NAV automation saved approximately $10 million over the past year through increased adoption of the driverless NAV initiative, an end-to-end automation of the NAV production and dissemination process that is foundational to supporting key Global Delivery objectives.

Recently deployed application programming interfaces (APIs) reduced manual touches to increase straight-through year-over-year processing rates for transactions and derivatives from 96 percent to 97 percent, and from 82 percent to 86 percent, respectively. And we are more than midway through our journey to deploy this fully automated NAV calculation and reporting process, which we expect to be complete by the end of 2023.

This initiative has been especially successful with Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) funds. The number of EMEA-domiciled daily funds on end-to-end NAV automation doubled from approximately 30 percent in 2020 to approximately 60 percent in 2021.

Additionally, we have experienced a 25 percent alert reduction year-over-year globally through increased automation, inclusive of AI.

DRIVING GREATER EFFICIENCIES

Advances in the way we leverage digital and other technologies to streamline our business unlocked efficiencies and reduced operating costs, helping to drive the operations- and technology-related savings of approximately $200 million in 2021 — savings that can be reinvested and redeployed to fuel other growth-enhancing capabilities.

In 2021, we simplified our operating model by deploying a more resilient, automated environment to drive client quality and productivity, with an agile footprint that enables rapid enhancement and standardization.

These innovations bolstered productivity levels, increasing our capacity to serve clients more efficiently and grow margins.

We continued to operate an advanced technology network designed to foster resiliency and productivity, enable timely innovation, and drive IT costs down as a percentage of revenue. By embedding a division-wide productivity mindset and measuring individual productivity performance for approximately 10,000 employees, we continued to unlock capacity across the entire organization in 2021.

DESIGNING A STATE-OF-THE-ART WORKPLACE

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred us to transform the way we work — now and in the future. To lead this journey, we stood up a dedicated team to design and implement our return-to-office plans and future workplace initiatives. Fundamentally, these efforts have been focused on improving the employee experience while maintaining our high level of business continuity and client service quality.

With the goal of exhibiting industry leadership in flexible work, we are redefining flexibility across our company. Enabled by a “mobile-first” technology strategy, we have established four core levers within our organization to lean in on flexibility — culture, learning and development, benefits and policy design, and workplace design — to empower our employees with a simplified and streamlined working experience, enabling us to retain and attract top talent that will help drive better outcomes for our clients.

SHAPING THE FUTURE

Leveraging nearly a century of innovative delivery expertise and some of the world’s most sophisticated technological know-how, we have developed the platform, partnerships, and solutions to streamline and deliver data, analytics, and real-time insights under one roof to help our clients achieve their unique business objectives.

As part of our commitment to improving client outcomes, we will continue to leverage the transformative power of automation, AI, and machine learning to generate operational efficiencies, service quality enhancements, and operational improvements for our clients.

As we look ahead, we are constantly refining our organizational structure to enable greater client focus, align and improve our control environment, and introduce new functions to strengthen our client interactions and enterprise connectivity. We will continue to invest in our people and cultivate a culture of innovation and delivery excellence in which people thrive and contribute their best work.

Importantly, we will continue to work closely with our clients to understand every facet of their business so we can better anticipate their future needs and serve them as effective partners in growth.