Letter from Chairman and CEO Ronald P. O’Hanley
Strength for the future
2025 underscored how thoughtful, consistent strategic actions anchored in a deep understanding of the world can lead to meaningful performance. In last year’s letter, I wrote about the central role of trust in everything we do, and that trust has since deepened into something even more meaningful, shaping how we partner across our work. In our industry, the pace and shape of change have accelerated — driven by shifting investor demands, breakthroughs in technology, geopolitical shifts, and a dynamic regulatory landscape that combine to push the frontier of what is possible — opening new avenues for growth for both us and those we serve. As client needs have taken on greater intricacy, we have innovated to enhance capabilities and develop products and solutions that would have been impossible only a few years ago. We continue not only to keep pace with change, but to actively lead change — fulfilling our purpose: to create better outcomes for the world’s investors and the people they serve.
Our strong 2025 financial results are an outcome of the choices we made throughout the year and years prior, and speak to the effectiveness of our strategy, the rigor of our execution, and our continued focus on sustainable shareholder returns. From this position of strength, we are well placed to advance the firm’s next phase of repeatable growth, supported by capabilities that consistently differentiate how we operate and deliver for clients.
A distinctive advantage that supports this momentum is our ability to partner, which we have embedded as an essential operating discipline across the firm. It is not limited to formal alliances, but serves as a core competency — how we listen actively, anticipate needs, and co-create solutions; how we work with clients and industry partners to deliver solutions aligned with where they will be in the future; and how we empower teams across the firm to act with ownership and accountability. Collectively, these elements enable us to serve as our clients’ essential partner not only today, but as the investment landscape continues to evolve.
Our strong 2025 financial results are an outcome of the choices we made
throughout the year and years prior, and speak to the effectiveness of our
strategy, the rigor of our execution, and our continued focus on sustainable shareholder returns.
That evolution, in turn, is being driven by powerful trends, including the maturation of investment economies, the continued democratization of investing, and the rapid expansion of private markets, wealth services, digital assets, and artificial intelligence (AI). We entered this period well positioned, with the scale, global reach, partnerships, and expertise needed to lead, and we continue to invest in the capabilities required to capture opportunity as these trends accelerate.
Demand for more advanced financial infrastructure continues to rise as economies transition from savings‑led to investment‑driven growth. To meet this demand, we are sharpening our focus on regions within our extensive global footprint that offer high‑growth opportunities, including the Middle East. As I write this letter, the ongoing conflict in the region is front of mind, and we remain focused on supporting our clients and our people with partnership, care, and continuity during periods of uncertainty. That commitment is longstanding. For more than three decades, we have invested in the region, advancing that commitment in 2025 with the establishment of our regional headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, coupled with an investment center and a plan to commence local custody in 2026. Continued investment, including our early‑2026 announcement of a new operations hub in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, reinforces our role as a trusted partner supporting the region’s financial ecosystem and its long-term development.
Beyond geographic focus, the continued democratization of investing is increasing demand for the capabilities where State Street leads. Within our Investment Management business, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) remain a key growth engine aligned with this trend. In 2025, this segment attracted record industry‑wide inflows while continuing to evolve beyond traditional uses, providing access to exposures that were historically difficult to reach.
By bringing private credit access to a broader range of investors through familiar and efficient ETF structures, our partnerships with Apollo Global Management, Bridgewater Associates, and Blackstone exemplify this opportunity. In doing so, we are breaking down traditional barriers and leading the next wave of product innovation.
A similar dynamic is evident in our Investment Services business, where we are supporting clients in advancing innovative dual‑share‑class ETF products, helping them manage the associated complexity while speeding their time to market. These same capabilities are critical in private markets, with clients relying on partners that can manage the heightened operational and data demands of this asset class. Our leadership in private markets servicing drove 12 percent year‑over‑year growth in private markets servicing fee revenue in 2025, reflecting rising client demand for scalable, sophisticated capabilities.
Our Markets business continues to lead with comprehensive liquidity, financing, global foreign exchange (FX) capabilities, and data‑driven insights to help clients navigate increasingly complex market ecosystems. As private markets continue to institutionalize, we see a steady opportunity to broaden how we support these clients and further align our capabilities with their evolving needs.
We also see a compelling growth runway in Wealth Services, where technology‑enabled platforms are reshaping service delivery. In 2025, we advanced our capabilities through a partnership and minority investment in Apex Fintech SolutionsTM, positioning us to deliver the industry’s first truly global digital wealth custody solution. This development reflects a clear extension of the broader industry direction toward a more connected, more scalable, and more digitally native infrastructure, and it positions us strongly to grow in one of the fastest‑growing segments of the market.
As digital assets move further into the mainstream, a new generation of financial infrastructure is taking shape. This momentum reflects growing institutional demand and improved regulatory clarity for stablecoins under the GENIUS Act, alongside evolving regulatory expectations for other digital assets. While this space is expanding and evolving at a remarkable speed, the networks remain disconnected. We view this fragmentation not as a constraint, but as a defining opportunity to standardize, link, and ultimately help connect the ecosystems of traditional and digital finance.
Our role as the provider of a secure, scalable, cost-efficient operational backbone is to enable institutions to transition confidently from traditional to digital finance. We advanced this priority with the launch of our Digital Asset Platform — a foundational capability designed to enhance liquidity, streamline settlement, and expand access to tokenized financial products, further positioning State Street as a trusted bridge across emerging platforms globally.
Beyond platform‑specific innovation, we are also advancing AI as a core capability across the firm. Unlike discrete initiatives, we view AI as an enterprise enabler of revenue growth and margin expansion. We are integrating it through a coordinated framework aligned to data, applications, engineering, agents, and controls. Our AI‑enhanced capabilities are laying the groundwork for the next generation of high-quality client service, employing digital workers, and enabling higher‑value work across the firm. Just as important, we are investing in the talent, training, tools, and culture that support the responsible application of these capabilities, strengthening judgment and accountability while advancing State Street’s Responsible AI principles that reinforce trust, transparency, and integrity as adoption scales.
Taken together, these priorities reflect how we are positioning the firm for future growth in an increasingly complex and interconnected operating environment. This positioning is underpinned by clear choices about the industry’s direction, strategy, and disciplined execution that enable us to deliver consistently and at scale.
“Our AI‑enhanced capabilities are laying the groundwork for the next generation of high-quality client service, employing digital workers, and enabling higher‑value work across the firm.”
2025 operating environment and financial performance1
In 2025, investors faced heightened uncertainty, driving significant volatility across global markets. Significant geopolitical shifts forced a broad repricing of risk, while rising debt levels and fiscal imbalances have added complexity to policy and investment decisions. At the same time, strong equity performance reflected optimism around AI‑driven productivity gains and supportive fiscal and monetary policies, particularly in the United States. These crosscurrents reinforced the need for resilience, measured responses, and a long-term perspective.
To this end, we plan for a wide range of scenarios, carefully manage what we can control, and act with speed, intention, and agility. Throughout the year, our teams demonstrated this agility — responding to evolving market dynamics while continuing to invest in the capabilities that position State Street for sustained growth. The investments made in prior years have laid the foundation for the success we are achieving today, and that same principle guides our path forward.
We further strengthened our client value proposition in 2025, delivering another year of accelerating financial performance. Excluding notable items, we delivered positive operating leverage2 for the second consecutive year and expanded pre-tax margin by more than 150 basis points. Also, excluding notable items, we generated return on tangible common equity of approximately 20 percent and delivered earnings per share of $10.30 — an increase of 19 percent year-over-year.
Our strong performance and balance sheet enabled us to return approximately $2.1 billion in capital to common shareholders through common share repurchases and dividends. Notably in the third quarter, we increased our declared quarterly common dividend per share by 11 percent.
We delivered record total revenue of approximately $14 billion, an increase of more than 7 percent from the prior year, excluding notable items. Fee revenue reached a record $11 billion, growing 9 percent year-over-year, excluding notable items, with broad-based contributions across Investment Services, Investment Management, and Markets. Net interest income (NII) increased 1 percent from the prior year, resulting in our third consecutive year of record NII.
Expense discipline remained a key focus as we supported revenue growth and continued targeted investment, with expenses increasing 5 percent, excluding notable items.
Client experience
In tandem with partnership, our business model places the client experience at the center of everything we do. Unlike traditional banks, whose revenues are more heavily tied to balance sheet activities, the vast majority of our revenues are generated from recurring fees linked directly to the recurring services we deliver. Success, therefore, depends on client service, consistent execution, and the ability to anticipate needs as markets and operating models evolve. Supported by data-driven insight and differentiated thought leadership, our partnership approach positions State Street as more than a service provider to our clients.
Delivering on that promise is a firmwide effort. Each of my State Street colleagues is focused either on directly supporting clients or enabling those who do. Their commitment underpins the service culture that defines State Street and continues to distinguish us in the market. In 2025, those collective efforts elevated the client experience further — improving service quality, strengthening client sentiment and loyalty, and delivering desired client retention levels across businesses and regions.
Central to this progress is our One State Street approach, which reflects our enterprise-wide commitment to operate and deliver as a unified firm. By bringing together the full scale of our capabilities, One State Street enables clients to experience a simpler, more cohesive relationship — one that aligns how we engage externally, collaborate internally, and innovate across the organization. By breaking down silos, connecting insights, and presenting a clear and consistent organization, we enable clients to access the full breadth of the firm through a single, coordinated experience.
“By bringing together the full scale of our capabilities, One State Street enables clients to experience a simpler, more cohesive relationship — one that aligns how we engage externally, collaborate internally, and innovate across the organization.”
The strength of our client experience is ultimately reflected in results across our businesses during the year. In Investment Services, we achieved record assets under custody and/or administration of $53.8 trillion, an increase of 16 percent year-over-year, primarily due to higher market levels and client flows, while continuing to make solid progress in client onboarding across the platform. In parallel, our software business continued to see strong client engagement with Charles River Development and made continued progress in transitioning clients to our cloud‑based software as a service platform.
In Investment Management, we ended the year with record full-year management fee revenue and continued our track record of consistent organic growth. Net new asset growth topped 3 percent for the third consecutive year in 2025, helping drive assets under management to an all-time high of $5.7 trillion at year-end, just two quarters after surpassing the $5 trillion mark for the first time. We also delivered record net inflows across our U.S. Low Cost, Gold, and EMEA ETF suites.
In Markets, client activity increased not only in response to periods of volatility, but also through continued solid client engagement. As clients relied on our expertise and execution capabilities, full-year fee revenue grew 16 percent in FX Trading Services, excluding notable items, and 15 percent in Securities Finance. This sustained momentum speaks to the depth of our client relationships and the strength of our Markets franchise. In recognition of that strength, State Street earned eight category wins in Euromoney’s FX Awards in 2025 — doubling our achievements from the prior year.
Across the firm, these results reflect a shared commitment to delivering consistent, high-quality experiences for clients. They underscore the progress we have made, not through any single initiative, but through coordinated effort, clear priorities, and a unified approach to serving our clients — positioning us well as their needs continue to evolve.
Differentiation through innovation and partnership
Innovation remains central to how we differentiate our firm and extend the value we deliver to clients. Drawing on our deep heritage, we continued to deliver cutting‑edge solutions across the franchise, supported by strong collaboration and partnership.
Within Investment Management, 2025 was a year of significant product development. We launched a record 134 new solutions, broadening our offering set and deepening our impact across asset classes and client segments. This included the introduction of 11 sector SPDR premium income ETFs and the continued expansion of our actively managed target maturity ETFs, further strengthening fixed income and retirement capabilities that remain core strategic priorities. These launches reflect our ability to scale innovation across a global platform.
Partnership continues to play a distinct role in supporting that innovation by extending our distribution reach and enhancing our technology capabilities. Over the course of the year, we advanced our partnership strategy to enhance personalization, technology integration, and access to high-growth markets. Through a combination of strategic investments and collaborations, we enhanced our ability to deliver personalized investment solutions at scale, expanded access to fast-growing client segments, strengthened capabilities in portfolio construction and innovation, and broadened our private markets capabilities. Collectively, these relationships enable us to reach new clients, deliver more differentiated solutions, and embed advanced technology more deeply across our platform.
Separately, as investor expectations evolve, access to data alone is no longer sufficient. Increasingly, clients are looking for foresight — the ability to identify emerging trends and act ahead of inflection points. In anticipation, we launched our Data Intelligence business, designed to transform proprietary and third-party data into actionable insights. With global reach and access to differentiated data sources, this capability enables investors to uncover opportunities, optimize performance, and make more informed decisions in a rapidly changing environment.
We strengthened this capability further through our acquisition of PriceStats, building on our partnership that has been in place since the firm’s founding. State Street PriceStats delivers near real-time economic insights that often lead traditional indicators. The timing of that acquisition underscored its value: We closed the transaction on the same day the longest U.S. government shutdown began, allowing us to provide access to critical economic data at a moment of heightened uncertainty.
The State Street Alpha® platform delivers a front‑to‑back value proposition through a configurable, open‑architecture offering that streamlines investment activities and enhances data integration. During the year, we continued to support clients and achieved key milestones, including with Ninety One and Invesco.
Building on a broader client relationship that began in 2004, our work with Ninety One demonstrates how this approach improves operating efficiency, increases data transparency, and equips front‑office teams with advanced technology to support investment decisions across a broad range of asset classes. Our collaboration with Invesco further reflects Alpha’s ability to support complex global operations by enabling a unified, interoperable operating model that drives greater scale, efficiency, and insight across investment operations. For our clients, our approach strengthens operational resilience while increasing agility in responding to evolving market and regulatory demands and, in turn, to the needs of those they serve.
Operational strength
Operational excellence remains fundamental to how we execute our strategy and support long-term growth. Next-gen transformation continues to serve as the engine of that execution, reshaping how we work by modernizing operating models and embedding digital and AI agent capabilities across the firm. As markets evolve and client expectations rise, we are building the tools, processes, and platforms that enable better connectivity, faster execution, and greater consistency at scale. This business-led, horizontally applied effort is increasing speed and alignment across functions, allowing us to respond more quickly to changing needs and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Our significant annual technology investment is aligned across the organization to support client centricity, collaboration, scalability, agility, and security, designing resilient platforms ready to support continued growth. These investments are purposeful and integrated — designed not only to modernize infrastructure, but also to reinforce the operating foundation on which our client and product strategies depend.
Disciplined expense management remains core to this approach. By aligning investment decisions closely with strategic priorities, we are able to support growth initiatives while preserving financial flexibility. Our productivity efforts continue to deliver meaningful results. In 2025, we achieved our full-year productivity savings target of approximately $500 million, contributing to $2 billion in cumulative savings over the past five years, including significant recurring cost benefits. A meaningful portion of these savings has been reinvested to strengthen capabilities and enhance overall operational effectiveness.
As a Global Systemically Important Bank, our focus on risk management and resilience remains foundational. Maintaining stability and confidence for clients around the world is central to our role in the global financial system. We view resilience not only as a responsibility, but also as a competitive advantage — supported by a strong control environment, ongoing investment in infrastructure, and the proactive identification of emerging risks. This forward-looking discipline enables us to protect the organization while expanding the capacity and flexibility required to scale securely.
Our people and communities
Our people are central to everything we achieve. Their expertise, integrity, and commitment earn the trust of our clients, power our performance, and advance State Street’s purpose and strategic priorities every day. It is through their efforts that our culture comes to life — a culture defined by a shared determination to deliver for our clients, our shareholders, and one another. This foundation enables us to attract, develop, and retain exceptional talent and remains a critical advantage as our business continues to evolve.
We invest in our people by equipping them with the skills, experiences, and opportunities needed to grow as professionals and leaders. Through continuous learning, skills‑based development, and broad access to career resources, we support our employees as they adapt to a changing industry and continue to deliver for our clients and the firm.
“Our people are central to everything we achieve. Their expertise, integrity, and commitment earn the trust of our clients, power our performance, and advance State Street’s purpose and strategic priorities every day.”
We also recognize that our success carries a broader responsibility to the communities in which we operate. Through State Street Foundation, we invested nearly $27 million in 2025, primarily supporting education and workforce readiness initiatives designed to create lasting economic opportunity. Our employees amplified this commitment through their own engagement, contributing more than 136,000 volunteer hours and providing skills-based support across the communities where they live and work.
Looking ahead
We look ahead with conviction — in our strategy, in our execution, and in the role State Street is uniquely positioned to play in the future of global finance and investment. The industry continues to undergo structural change, marked by greater complexity, accelerated digitization, and rising investor expectations. These dynamics increasingly favor institutions that can combine scale, agility, and trusted partnership. That is precisely where State Street excels.
We remain focused on capturing the growth opportunity ahead through a disciplined execution of our strategic priorities and a relentless focus on innovation. We are advancing transformation to enhance how we operate and serve clients, while embedding digital and AI‑enabled capabilities more deeply across the organization. Our One State Street approach — connecting capabilities to unlock the full value of our franchise — has demonstrated results and has even greater potential.
I am grateful to our colleagues across State Street for their unrelenting focus on delivering for our clients, shareholders, and each other, and I am confident in what we will achieve next as a firm. With strong momentum and a proven strategy, State Street is well positioned to deliver sustainable growth and long‑term value for our shareholders.
Thank you for your continued partnership.
Ronald P. O’Hanley
Chairman and CEO
This annual report, including, without limitation, the letters to shareholders, contains forward-looking statements as defined by U.S. securities laws. These statements are not guarantees for future performance, are inherently uncertain, are based on assumptions that are difficult to predict, and have a number of risks and uncertainties.
Further, the forward-looking statements speak only as of the time of this annual report is first published, and State Street does not undertake efforts to revise forward-looking statements. Refer to Item 1A of the Form 10-K included with this annual report for details.