Naomi Yamamoto: I'm Naomi Yamamoto, Global Program Manager at State Street. Today we're here with Donna Milrod, Chief Product Officer, and Joern Tobias, the Head of Investor Servicing Product Management. Thank you for being with us today. Donna, I'm going to start my question with you. Transfer agency continues to evolve as a strategic part of State Street's product lines. Can you talk about how that evolution is shaping the way we service our clients?

Donna Milrod: Sure. Thanks so much, Naomi. It's great to be here. I'd say, first of all, transfer agency has been a core part of our bundled service offering for a long time and a key differentiator for us. But really, the world of transfer agency is shifting. So our asset manager clients are also going through enormous amounts of change with respect to their distribution complexities that they're facing. For one, they're operating in multiple jurisdictions with different regulatory changes coming their way. They also are seeing a convergence of the type of fund structures that are out there, as well as the changing clients themselves. So the investor segments are also becoming more and more complex.

So our clients are now looking for really partners, not just an asset servicer or a specific technology. It's really important that they have this partnership as they go through this very complex distribution change that's happening in the marketplace. And that's part of the reason why we took the step earlier this year to announce how, for our transfer agency capabilities and services in Luxembourg and Ireland, we've decided to bring those in-house to really give us the opportunity to really get closer to our clients, because that proximity is so important as they're going through all the changes that they're going through.

Naomi Yamamoto: I'm going to focus on you next, Joern. What role does transfer agency play in delivering critical support for our clients?

Joern Tobias: First of all, thank you for having me, Naomi, that's a very interesting question, dependent on how you define the value chain of, a fund process, you could argue that, the transfer agency is at the entry point of that journey, because it represents the demand into the fund. Whereas what the investment manager can control is basically the fund portfolio construction. They can control the past performance of the fund, the marketing efforts, whereas the transfer agency provides the immediate experience the investor has getting into the fund, and therefore we at State Street are really continuously investing into that digital journey for the investor to enter into the fund. And it's very important that this experience resembles the experience investors have today with either e-commerce or with neobanks or direct banks. It needs to be convenient, smooth and seamless to come on board, and this is where we spend our efforts and our investments to make that journey as smooth as possible.

Naomi Yamamoto: Donna, as part of the broader efforts to modernize transfer agency, we recently re-entered the UK market with River Global. Can you talk about how this technology supports our strategy to enhance the client experience?

Donna Milrod: Sure. Thanks so much for that question, Naomi. So I'd say, first of all, irrespective of transfer agency, technology is an enabler. It's kind of core and foundational to, you know, everything we're doing for clients. And, as it relates to the transfer agency space in particular, the technology is changing pretty rapidly. And it's really, you know, key to kind of to keeping pace with our clients and what's happening as they deal with this complex distribution, experience that they're having, because you see investment products themselves changing a lot. There's a blurred line between kind of traditional fund structures and the alternative fund structures, etc. And technology really helps us enable that as well as our digital first strategy.

So reentry into the UK transfer agency market had really two main goals. The first is obviously jurisdictional coverage. We haven't been in a direct participant in the UK transfer agency market for some time, and this is an opportunity for us to get into it with this new technology, which really allowed us to start our strategy with respect to providing a digital first solution to our clients. Our clients are looking for more and more all the time. They're looking for more real time data, more digitized workflows, a better onboarding experience, and really a better front, you know, kind of, user experience for their clients, and this enabled us to do to do all of that and technology, beyond what I just talked about, also does two other things.

First, in terms of distribution analytics, clients really want to know what's happening as they are distributing their funds, to their investors, and this allows them to see where they, what's happening within their, value chain from a distribution point of view. The second is really about modernizing the infrastructure. So we're very committed to that. We make a lot of investments in our technology. This is a way for us to do that and really think about ways in which transfer agency can be really future focused and future proof. So the technology we're using is sitting on a blockchain technology. We're not necessarily using blockchain right away, but we need to be ready for it because transfer agency really is a great use case for digital asset technology.

So taken together, we want to make sure that we are not only there for our clients. You know, in the day like today in dealing with the complexities that they're dealing with today, but really where they're going and making sure that our infrastructure is really future proof. So the last thing I'd say is we want to make sure our clients and this is also part of our strategy, are really focused on kind of having one experience across all those complex, fund structures that I talked about, as well as across the jurisdictions that they are engaged in. And in order for us to do that, we really need to modernize the infrastructure that we have.

Naomi Yamamoto: It sounds like it's going to make a big difference in the underlying investors that our clients have.

Donna Milrod: Absolutely.

Naomi Yamamoto: So, Joern, I also would like to talk about the trends within transfer agency looking into the future. How do you think it's going to change within the transfer agency services area?

Joern Tobias: Very exciting times in the transfer agency at this stage because, there was not much innovation over the past decades and a lot of legacy technology, being in play, and that is now fast changing. So digital first means a seamless digital experience for the investor, but also facilitating the oversight function for the investment manager by getting real-time access, into the activities. So I would say that that's trend number one. Trend number two is investment managers now looking into, the distribution channels, and beside the traditional distribution, they are also exploring direct-to-consumer distribution to protect their brand name, but also to carve out some basis point from the distribution costs.

Naomi Yamamoto: I think it's very exciting to be part of State Street and also within the transfer agency market. So thank you so much for being with us today. It's always a pleasure to have the executives here in Luxembourg, and your information that you shared with me has been very valuable. So thank you.

Donna Milrod: Thank you so much, Naomi.