Global Custody Pro - 13 June 2025

JPMorgan, Northern Trust, BNY, SG Forge, Broadridge and more

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Global Custody Pro
June 12, 2025 • Reading Time: 9 minutes

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📰 Welcome to the Newsletter

Welcome to Global Custody Pro! I'm Brennan McDonald, Managing Editor. I write about the global custody industry after 12+ years in financial services, including working at a global custodian. An AI voice reads the audio version of this newsletter. Have feedback? Just reply to this email or connect with us on LinkedIn.

📠 Editor’s Comment

This week, we have some more investor conference remarks from industry leaders. As regulatory clarity around digital assets evolves, US-based firms' final state of play will likely emerge in the next few months. What are you hearing?

Table of Contents

🌏 Global Custody News

JPMorgan eyes custody growth, braces for regulatory shift

  • The big picture: JPMorgan Chase prioritises disciplined organic growth across its core businesses, with CEO Jamie Dimon explicitly identifying custody, payments, and markets as areas for expansion. The strategy is driven by a management philosophy focused on detailed financial allocations and continuous assessment of global competitors, rather than a primary focus on M&A.

  • Why it matters: Dimon anticipates significant regulatory changes. He describes the current US framework as disjointed and argues it pushes activities out of the regulated banking system. He expects reforms to rules like the SLR and LCR, directly impacting capital requirements, operational parameters, and the competitive landscape for large financial institutions.

  • The Bottom Line: The resolution of this regulatory uncertainty is expected to convert the firm's approximately $60 billion in excess capital into deployable assets. Dimon stated the firm's capital deployment hierarchy is first to fund dividends and organic growth, assess inorganic opportunities, and consider share buybacks.

Northern Trust outlines asset servicing strategy

  • Driving the news: According to Northern Trust's president of asset servicing, Theresa Parker, the division is focused on driving profitable growth through accretive new business, enhancing client profitability with higher-margin products, and improving operational resiliency and productivity.

  • The strategy involves pivoting from certain investment operations outsourcing (IOO), which deals with high upfront costs, to prioritising new business that meets the firm's target financial model, particularly in the alternatives sector.

  • On the Radar: The firm is preparing its infrastructure for the potential acceleration of asset tokenisation and changes to cash settlement, which could shorten settlement cycles. Despite recent regulatory shifts, it views this as a larger opportunity than crypto custody.

Broadridge details growth strategy

  • The big picture: Broadridge outlined its growth strategy centred on three core pillars: democratising and digitising governance; simplifying and innovating trading in capital markets; and modernising wealth management. With $4.5 billion in annual fee revenue, the company stated it services 28 of 29 globally systemic important banks and processes $10 trillion in daily fixed income settlements.

  • Go deeper: The firm's innovation efforts, including the recent rollout of its Bond GPT platform and initiatives in distributed ledger repo, are explicitly aimed at "speeding execution, lowering execution costs, [and] lowering execution risk" for clients in capital markets. For wealth management, the strategy focuses on providing modular back-office solutions to allow firms to modernise on their terms.

  • On the radar: Broadridge anticipates continued growth driven by the "democratisation of investing," which has resulted in mid-teens equity position growth in FY25. The company identifies the developing regulatory regimes for digital assets and ongoing proxy reform as potential future opportunities, noting it has already launched a disclosure solution for digital assets.

BNY Pershing’s Wove platform wants to grow

  • By the Numbers: BNY Pershing’s Wove advisor platform, launched in 2022, generated an incremental $30 million in revenue in 2024. The company stated it is on track to deliver an additional $60 million to $70 million in new revenue for 2025, bringing the platform's potential total annual run-rate to $100 million at the high end.

  • The platform’s economic model relies on multiple revenue streams beyond simple technology sales. Revenue is generated from app usage, account fees, balances added to BNY’s Choice Money Market Fund programme, and assets added to the platform under a basis point pricing model.

  • A key element of the growth strategy is that the Wove platform is custodian-agnostic. This allows BNY Pershing to target not only its captive base of over 650 US wealth firms but also firms that do not use BNY for custody, creating a significantly larger addressable market.

State Street outlines tech-driven 'enterprise outsourcer' strategy

  • Driving the news: State Street is executing an expansion of its total addressable market in investment servicing, moving beyond traditional custody to focus on its Alpha front-to-back platform, private markets, and software services. The firm noted that its software and private markets businesses grew 10% and 15% respectively last year, with a stated goal for software to approach $1 billion in revenue over the next several years.

  • Why it matters: This strategy aims to reposition the firm as an "enterprise outsourcer," with executives stating the model proved its resilience during recent market volatility by handling record volumes with "zero NAV failures." According to CEO Ron O'Hanley, such events demonstrate that high-quality investment services are "not commoditised at all" and reaffirm clients' choice of provider based on service quality over price.

  • On the Radar: The firm anticipates a "next gen transformation" driven by generative AI to further re-engineer its operating models, having already reduced headcount by 4,000 last year, partly through automation. State Street expects AI to enable greater standardisation, improve service quality, reduce cycle times, and ultimately drive "step function" improvements in operational efficiency and cost structures over time.

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🚀 Digital Asset News

SocGen-FORGE taps BNY for new USD stablecoin custody

  • Key Move: Societe Generale-FORGE (SG-FORGE) is launching a US Dollar-denominated stablecoin, USD CoinVertible (USDCV), on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, appointing BNY as the reserve custodian. The initiative follows the firm's launch of a Euro-denominated stablecoin (EURCV) in April 2023 and is positioned as an institutional-grade asset.

  • The structure is designed to provide clients with 24/7 conversion between fiat and digital currencies, supporting on-chain settlement, foreign exchange, collateral management, and cross-border payments. According to the release, BNY's appointment as reserve custodian is intended to enable "seamless integration between traditional and digital financial ecosystems.“

  • The token fully complies with the European Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation, with SG-FORGE licensed as an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) in France. Jean-Marc Stenger, CEO of SG-FORGE, stated the launch was the "obvious next step" to address the "exponentially" growing and essentially US Dollar-denominated stablecoin market.

Coinbase details institutional derivatives push

  • Driving the news: At a Morgan Stanley conference, Coinbase's Vice President of Product Management, Greg Tussar, detailed the firm's institutional strategy, focusing on its recent acquisition of derivatives exchange Deribit and plans to launch a US-listed perpetual futures contract in the second half of this year. The Deribit acquisition adds a non-US options platform with over $35 billion in open interest. It is intended to round out Coinbase's product portfolio alongside its existing spot and futures markets.

  • Go deeper: The key strategic driver for the Deribit acquisition is the future ability to offer cross-margining across spot, futures, and options, which Tussar described as a "real game changer" for capital efficiency. The company plans to compete with established exchanges for US derivatives by leveraging its 24/7 trading capability for futures and launching a long-dated future with daily interest rate resets designed to mimic the popular offshore perpetual contracts.

  • On the radar: Coinbase anticipates significant structural changes driven by a more engaged regulatory environment, particularly from the US Securities and Exchange Commission's new crypto task force. Tussar stated the firm expects the SEC to grant "no action relief" for experimentation in tokenisation, which could redefine the role of transfer agents by recognising blockchains as the primary source for books and records.

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