Katherine Lucas: I'm here with Tony Bisegna, head of our markets business globally, and Will Kinlaw, head of research for our markets business. And we're going to dive right into our conversation. And Tony, I want to start with you. Why does a trading business need a research arm, especially one with such an extensive network and offering.
Tony Bisegna: Many of the products that we sell through markets essentially are commodities. So it's about price. And to really have a lasting relationship with our clients, you need a way to differentiate yourself. And research provides a way to differentiate our service model. It differentiates the level of insights that we can provide to our clients to help them do their jobs better. It's a reason for them to pick the phone up and call us to execute a trade. They could do a euro trade with us. They could do a euro trade with JP Morgan. They could do it with Citibank. It's the same thing. A euro is a euro is a euro. Why do they call us? It's a reason for them to think about State Street when they need to do a trade.
Katherine Lucas: Will, deep dive with me just a little bit on exactly what our research offering is.
Will Kinlaw: Sure. Absolutely. Well, as Tony said, one of the most important things about it is that it is different. Right. We've made some very intentional choices to look different from what many of the big banks offer. And what we really start with is what are our clients trying to achieve? Our clients have one overarching goal. They need to beat their benchmarks. They need to outperform. And we see two ways they can do that. One thing is they can have better information. They can have access to information that others don't. They can also have better ways of processing information, better ways of building portfolios, better ways of hedging, better ways of turning raw data into investment signals. And we've really organized ourselves to invest in both of those areas. So we've spent a tremendous amount of energy over two decades harnessing the information advantage that State Street has and building aggregated and anonymized signals from our custodial data. We've partnered with startups like price Stats that is now the world's leading developer of high frequency inflation that's followed not only by hundreds of our clients, but also by over a dozen central banks and government treasuries around the world, including the Fed. So we've made this big investment in data and information that gives our clients an edge. But we've also spent a lot of time thinking about not only how do we come to market views, but how do we improve process. Investment is really process driven. Investors use models. They have tools to construct portfolios. And through our partnerships with leading academics, we have eight professors we work with from three institutions. We're writing papers and constantly trying to innovate in terms of how can they build a better model, how can they improve their forecasts, how can they build a better portfolio.
Katherine Lucas: This is great and I want to pull on this. How is it different thread a little bit. So talk to me about some of the intuitive and interactive ways that we can engage with the research that your team is creating.
Will Kinlaw: Sure. Well, in terms of how it's different, you know, one of the unique advantages State Street has is a global custodian, is the massive amount of flow information that we have that we can give clients insights into how institutional investors are positioned. That's something that very few institutions in the world can do, and no one has invested as much as we have in that effort. So that's something that's very different in terms of how clients engage with it. We have a research platform. It's called Insights. Right now it's an interactive website. Later this year, we'll be launching our mobile app, so that allows clients to log in, read the views that our strategy team has put forward, interact with a charting and tools to test ideas, see what indicators are showing recently about key investments that they may have in their portfolio. And it also even allows them in some cases to download individual data points and put them into a quantitative model. So it's a way to access the research in all different formats depending on how they like to consume information. We even this year launched a podcast. So for clients who may be in the car or may be jogging or commuting in different ways, they can listen to the research that way as well.
Katherine Lucas: Well, I'm an avid consumer of that podcast and I am loving absolutely everything I'm hearing here because this is to me, this is really game changing for our clients right? So this clearly has been developed with them in mind. Tony, talk to me a little bit about when our markets business decided that they needed this research function and what was some of the thinking behind this decision.
Tony Bisegna: So it was many, many years ago. My predecessor actually several predecessors ago, Stan Shelton, I was a trader at the time, and this was back around 2000 and we were talking on the desk and he realized we were starting to grow the business and we were trying to compete with the large investment banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley's, Citibank, JP Morgan's. And he realized we didn't have any unique edge. They had elaborate research teams focused on individual fundamental stock analysis, for example, or security analysis. And we didn't have anything. And he's like, We just can't compete. And he came up with an idea in some discussions with, I believe, Mark Kritzman and Ken Fruit, the founders of State Street Associates, with him. About a way of leveraging the information that we had, being a leading custodian and taking what's now trillions and trillions of dollars of assets and anonymizing them and producing insights we call fact based research. It's the facts, what investors are doing. And it was completely different and completely cutting edge. And it gave us a means of being able to walk into a buy side shop and they'd say, You have this small bank in Boston. Why should we trade with you? Well, here's our research, and you'd be sitting in front of a PM and they'd really be interested in it. And they liked it, and it gave us an edge and it helped us really build our business and to be a leading business globally. And we're trying to leverage that now across global markets to other products. And others have tried to copy it to some degree, but we're very much on the front edge of it. So I like to think about when I think about the research product. Back in the early 2000s, we were big data before that term was even coined and we've taken it much farther since then with all the partnerships that Will is alluding to.
Katherine Lucas: Thank you so much, Tony and Will for joining me in what has been a fantastic conversation about our research backed data and strategic partnerships with leading academics in the industry. Thank you.
