Northern Trust Corporation

and welcome to the Northern Trust Corporation's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Jennifer Child, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Northern Trust Corporation's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on our call this morning is Michael Grady, our Chairman and CEO of Jason Tyler, our new president of wealth management and former chief financial officer, Dave Fox, our new chief financial officer, John Landers, our controller, and Grace Higgins from our investor relations team. Our third 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 October 23rd call is being webcast live on northerntrust.com. The only authorized rebroadcast of this call is the replay that will be made available on our website through November 23rd. Northern Trust disclaims any continuing accuracy of the information provided in this call after today. Please refer to our safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements on page 12 of the accompanying presentation, which will apply to our commentary on this call. 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 Mike O'Grady.

Thank you, Jennifer. Let me join in welcoming you to our third quarter 2024 earnings call. As Jennifer mentioned, Dave Fox became our CFO on October 1st when Jason became president of our wealth management business. Jason will review our financial performance for the third quarter in a few minutes, and he and I will take your questions. Dave will take Jason's place on our fourth quarter earnings call, and many of you will have the opportunity to meet Dave in the coming weeks. We're grateful to Jason for his considerable contributions over the past five years as CFO, including successfully managing our balance sheet through a number of challenging events, including the COVID pandemic and the collapse of several financial institutions last year. I'm confident that Jason has the right skills, understanding of the business, and vision to lead wealth management into its next chapter of growth. I also want to welcome Dave to the CFO chair. Dave has a long track record of success in leading businesses and driving financial performance. Most recently, Dave ran our global family office business. Under his tenure, GFO trust fees grew at a compound annual rate of 10%. Dave also served as head of asset servicing for the Americas. Dave is a highly respected leader whose deep industry knowledge and strong financial acumen make him the right choice to serve as Northern's next CFO. Turning to our third quarter performance, our results benefited from strong market performance, but also reflect continued positive momentum across our businesses. Relative to the prior year, trust fees were up 8%, Net interest income grew 21%, and excluding notables, earnings per share grew 36%. Importantly, we generated positive trust fee and total operating leverage, while continuing to make significant investments in our business and infrastructure. We also returned $453 million to shareholders. Within wealth management, we generated strong year-over-year trust fee growth of 9% and reached record AUM levels. Our new business momentum improved, reflecting the maturation of a number of initiatives started over the past 12 to 18 months. Global Family Office performed particularly well, generating mid-single-digit organic growth both in the third quarter and year-to-date. International relationships, which have been an area of focus in recent years, drove a healthy portion of this growth, including a marquee win sourced through collaboration with Asset Servicing, demonstrating the power of our One Northern Trust strategy. Asset management generated positive liquidity flows for the seventh consecutive quarter and positive flows in tax-advantaged equities, active fixed income, and alternatives. This translated into healthy organic AUM growth despite continued pressure on index products. Continued strong investment performance is supporting our organic growth, with active fixed income outperforming benchmarks over one-, three-, and five-year timeframes. NTAM's performance is also attributable to leveraging our One Northern Trust strategy to deliver clients the solutions and capabilities of the entire firm. Year-to-date, NTAM has launched 13 new products, including a Treasury-only money market fund that has generated nearly $2 billion in flows in less than six months, largely from GFO clients. Our asset servicing business performed well in the quarter. Transaction volumes were healthy. Capital markets activities were up double digits for the second quarter. and new business growth continues to be booked at attractive margins. As we discussed, our goal is to generate new business that is scalable. We've shifted our focus to opportunities that require lower levels of incremental costs and to cross-selling products and services to existing clients. As an example, this week we announced an expansion of our relationship with Artemis, a leading UK-based asset manager with more than $33 billion in AUM. We're in all trading activity for Artemis' equity funds and all OTC and exchange-traded derivatives will be outsourced to Northern. We will now support the complete lifecycle of these investments, from execution to custody, including fund administration, depository, global custody, and transfer agency services for its U.K. and Luxembourg domiciled funds. While it will take time to realize the full benefits of the pivot in our strategy, it should lead to more profitable growth as our business makes shifts. During the third quarter, we proudly celebrated our company's 135th anniversary. The core principles of service, expertise, and integrity upon which our company was founded still guide us today. As we look forward, we're taking steps to strengthen the foundation, position the firm for higher underlying growth, and enhance our operational efficiency, all while continuing to invest to meet the evolving needs of our clients and to create value for all our stakeholders for years to come. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jason to review our financial performance for the quarter. Jason?