Bank of New York Mellon: Q4 rise due to asset management
BANK of New York Mellon reported a sharp rise in fourth quarter earnings yesterday on the back of rising assets under management.
BNY Mellon, one of the world’s largest custody banks, said earnings soared from $50m (£31m) to $712m year-on-year. Assets under custody and administration were up 10 per cent to $22.3 trillion at the end of December.
Profit was 55 cents per share, excluding a tax benefit. Securities servicing fees fell four per cent to $1.2bn. Around $139m was spent on severance pay for 300 redundancies.
Chief executive Robert Kelly said buoyant equity markets had driven investment performance.
Chief financial officer Todd Gibbons added: “We expected that asset management would lead us out of this recession and it is doing exactly that.”
He added: “We expect large market growth in the asset management and securities servicing space and a large amount of that will be foreign.”
However, the firm sustained a full-year net loss of $1.4bn compared with net income of $1.4bn in 2008.
BNY Mellon will not set bonuses for top executives until February. When it does, incentive compensation is expected to be 20 per cent lower than in 2008.