BNY Mellon’s Pershing, which represents the biggest line of business in the bank’s newly created Market and Wealth Services unit, gathered up almost $20 billion in net new assets in the first quarter, but revenue and fees were down as a result of business lost last year to recruiting and M&A deals.
In its Investment and Wealth Management unit, wealth management revenue was up, as were client assets. The rise in revenue was due to market gains and higher net interest revenue. Client assets benefited from net inflows as well as higher markets.
Earnings were down in Market and Wealth Services as well as in Investment and Wealth Management, where revenue fell. Revenue was flat in Market and Wealth Services.
On the conference call with analysts, the outgoing CEO of BNY Mellon, Todd Gibbons, spent some time talking about Pershing X, a business unit the bank created last year to develop technology that will provide a wide variety of services to RIAs and broker-dealers.
“In Pershing X,” he said, “we continue to make solid progress since announcing the initiative back in October. Following on last quarter’s acquisition of Optimal Asset Management, this quarter we made several key hires, which completed the filling out of our leadership team. And we folded Albridge’s wealth reporting and data aggregation tool under the Pershing X umbrella.” In this way, said Gibbons, who is set to retire Aug. 31, the engineers of Albridge Solutions will be able to speed up development of the platform.
For the key takeaways from BNY Mellon’s earnings announcement and call, scroll down through our slideshow. For coverage of Pershing’s previous quarterly earnings, click here.