Driving growth through innovation
We continue to see strong interest in digital technology and
infrastructure from both institutional and alternatives clients as a
means to solve current operational challenges, increase liquidity, or
find new distribution channels.
Donna Milrod
Chief Product Officer
As an organization, we are always striving to create new and better ways of
serving our clients. At State Street, innovation is not a product, a
strategy, a goal, or a one-and-done initiative. Rather, it is an ethos and
attitude ingrained across our enterprise.
We are committed to leading the industry, facilitating systemic change and
transformation to better serve clients and deliver value to investors.
Through our in-depth knowledge of global financial markets and our clients'
needs, we not only see the future; we are helping to shape it.
Among the most tangible benefits of State Street's innovation mindset are
the sophisticated products and data platforms we have created by teaming
with the best minds in the business, both internally and externally.
With the evolution of fund structures and growing investor demand for exchange-traded funds (ETFs),
we developed and implemented State Street Total ETF, which provides
clients with a full suite of capabilities, from pre-launch planning and
project management, to a host of servicing and global markets capabilities
and portfolio management tools.
We also announced that GlobalLink, our award-winning suite of digital
multi-asset trading solutions, has introduced a new, open client platform.
The platform enables customized workflows and a seamless user experience
across the full suite of GlobalLink-branded solutions and other strategic
third-party partners.
GlobalLink's new platform functionality has been purposefully designed to
better enhance services, solutions, and automation, allowing institutions
and applications to speak to each other through an integrated dashboard,
helping to yield cost savings and maximize trading and workflow efficiency.
STATE STREET DIGITAL®: BUILDING THE FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE FUTURE
Digital assets are a transformational force in our industry, and will be for
years to come. As such, they represent a sizable opportunity to create new
market settlement solutions based on transfer of value rather than
information. Opportunities also exist to gain operational efficiencies from
smart contracts and assets programmability, as well as enhanced liquidity
and ease of distribution. Firms are increasingly recognizing the benefits
of tokenization and utilization of distributed ledger technology (DLT).
We currently support the administration of crypto assets under management
for multiple funds. As decentralized finance continues to gain traction in
global markets, we have developed a series of in-house, permanent, private
DLT networks with robust security that are flexible and scalable.
This DLT ecosystem is the foundation for State Street Digital, and supports
each aspect of our strategy, including asset tokenization. The ecosystem
integrates with our current fund administration and accounting service
offering for funds, including those that hold cryptocurrencies, and we will
continue to integrate new services as we advance our front-to-back
digital strategy.
We also continue to attract strong interest in digital technology and
infrastructure from both institutional and alternatives clients seeking ways
to achieve operational efficiency and open new distribution channels. To
help clients stay ahead of developments and regulatory shifts around digital
finance, we launched a quarterly thought leadership compendium, Digital
Digest. Featuring timely, topical insights from our digital markets experts,
the Digital Digest has been well-received by clients and was recognized at
the 2022 Crypto AM Awards.
In 2023, we will continue to focus on commercializing digital wallets,
DLT, tokenization, and smart contract capabilities. As regulatory
agencies begin to clarify rules governing cryptocurrencies, digital assets,
and infrastructure, we expect client demand to further intensify and new
opportunities to emerge. We will continue to work closely with regulators as
the crypto investment landscape evolves.
Our goal is to continually enhance our client experience and technology
solutions through innovation, while driving efficiency and productivity
across our organization.
Brian Franz
Chief Information Officer and Head of Enterprise Resiliency
Across the enterprise, our technology transformation efforts are focused on
optimizing efficiency and resiliency, and driving innovation and growth. In
2022, we continued to advance our multi-year technology strategy, with a
focus on modernizing our platform, streamlining our business, unlocking
efficiencies, and increasing productivity.
We drove meaningful gross operations and technology savings, which were
redeployed to fuel other growth-enhancing capabilities.
We also continued to operate an advanced technology network to accelerate
innovation and meet client expectations. To this end, we are creating a
simplified infrastructure that leverages artificial intelligence and
machine learning automation, underpinned by a hybrid multi-cloud
architecture.
In addition to building out a formidable IT ecosystem underpinned by our own
in-house capabilities, we also continued to partner with leading
technology firms — a strategy that helps us innovate with agility and give
clients access to a broader selection of best-in-class solutions,
efficiently and at scale. We are applying this technology-led approach to
enhancing and digitizing our core products and services — from custody and
accounting to fund administration and transfer agency — future-proofing our
capabilities to help solve our clients' problems today and meet their future
needs.
For example, we partnered with the industry's top provider of a scalable,
cloud-native investment accounting, fund accounting, and contingency net
asset value solution that enables straight-through processing, from
portfolio management and trading, to custody and administration. By
embedding these capabilities into our State Street Alpha platform, we
strengthened our ability to offer clients the critical data they need to
transact and better understand their investment performance.
Further, by partnering with the industry's leading public and private cloud
service providers, we were able to accelerate our migration to the cloud,
reduce our facilities footprint, and improve our risk posture.
Our technology transformation aims to accelerate business innovation and the
delivery of new products and services, while enhancing client outcomes and
automating processes to help deliver cost savings.
looking ahead
In 2023, we will continue to execute against our strategic priorities of
delivering growth, fostering innovation, and enhancing shareholder value.
Key focus areas include driving core growth in traditional investment
services globally, further building out Alpha as an industry-leading
platform, enhancing our private markets enterprise outsourcing offering,
pursuing new growth opportunities in digital assets and wealth services, and
continuously optimizing and fortifying our operating model.
We will maintain an unwavering focus on serving our clients as the
industry's best partner, operator, innovator, and employer of choice.