Northern Trust Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Northern Trust Corporation's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to the Director of Investor Relations, Mark Betty, for opening remarks and introductions. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Northern Trust Corporation's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me on our call this morning are Michael Grady, our Chairman and CEO of Jason Tyler, our chief financial officer, Lauren Allnut, our controller, and Kelly Lernaghan from our investor relations team. Our second quarter earnings press release and financial trends report are both available on our website at northerntrust.com. Also on our website, you will find our quarterly earnings review presentation, which we will use to guide today's conference call. This July 22nd call is being webcast live on northerntrust.com. The only authorized rebroadcast of this call is the replay that will be available on our website through August 19th. Northern Trust disclaims any continuing accuracy of the information provided in the call after today. Now for our safe harbor statement. What we say during today's conference call may include forward-looking statements, which are Northern Trust's current estimates and expectations of future events or future results. Actual results, of course, could differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements because the realization of those results is subject to many risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. I urge you to read our 2019 annual report on Form 10-K and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for detailed information about factors that could affect actual results. During today's question and answer session, please limit your initial query to one question and one related follow-up. This will allow us to move through the queue and enable as many people as possible the opportunity to ask questions as time permits. Thank you again for joining us today.

Let me turn the call over to Michael Grady. Thank you, Mark. Let me join Mark in welcoming you to our second quarter 2020 earnings call. As the current public health crisis continues, I hope you and your families are healthy and well, and I offer my condolences to all who have suffered a personal loss. At Northern Trust, we've remained focused on safeguarding our employees, serving our clients, and supporting our communities during these unprecedented times. We continue to operate in what we call resiliency mode, which means we are focused on providing continuity of service for our clients while over 90% of our employees are working remotely. Although we have developed plans to position ourselves to return to our offices when conditions permit, We will only do so in a particular geography when we are comfortable and confident in our ability to ensure a safe environment for all of our employees and clients. As a result, we expect to remain in resiliency mode for some time to come. In this operating environment, we have adapted how we serve and communicate with our clients, as well as how we prospect for new clients. In each of our businesses, this has resulted in engaging with clients and prospects more than ever and provided an opportunity for us to deepen our relationships. In the second quarter, our asset management business won several new mandates across different products and strategies, including receiving significant new inflows into our global money market fund complex, which we've strategically positioned over time. In wealth management, we launched a new Navigate to Now digital marketing campaign, which is showing early promise, and introduced the Northern Trust Institute, a research center with 175 faculty covering 34 specialty areas designed to harness our expertise and experience and elevate our advice by bringing predictive insights to our clients. In asset servicing, we experienced a modest deferral in implementations and new fund launches in the quarter. However, new business continues to be healthy as prospects become more comfortable conducting searches and due diligence virtually in the current environment. As Jason will discuss, the low interest rate environment will continue to create meaningful headwinds and pressure our financial performance. Through this environment, we will stay focused on our mission of being our client's most trusted financial partner and on generating organic growth and gains in productivity. I feel it's also important to note that at Northern Trust, we have always been mindful that we have a duty to serve our communities as well. Recent attention to the civil, social, and economic inequities black Americans face every day has provided us with an opportunity to reflect further on this service and the role we play to address inequity in our communities. Toward this end, we have committed $20 million over the next five years to reduce the economic opportunity gap. This opportunity gap encompasses all the obstacles created by race, ethnicity, gender, environmental, and socioeconomic status that too often keep people from achieving their full potential. Our goal is to help shrink this gap by providing increased access to essential human needs, food, housing, healthcare, and education, so that each person may grow and thrive personally, professionally, and financially. Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation for our staff, whose commitment, excellence, and professionalism throughout these extraordinary times has been exceptional. Now, let me turn the call to Jason to review our financial results for the quarter.