Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, IMFN. World Bank Annual Meetings are now underway in Washington, DC, and that brings together finance ministers, central bankers, and a lot of big policymakers to that town. And of course it also brings a lot of the big bank CEOs as well, discussions about the global economy, fiscal policy, as well as regulation.
Please to say that one of those big CEOs joins us right now, Robin Vince heads be and why the oldest bank in America and one of the biggest custodians of assets in the world. He's sitting down right now alongside our bury own Lisa Abramowitz.
Lisa, thank you so much.
Romain.
Yeah, this is the confab of everyone in finance and politics and policymaking. And we have someone who has the first loan made to the United States when it was written up in seventeen eighty nine during the time of Alexander Hamilton. Robin Vince, thank you so much for being here. I want to start with the sort of dueling ideas here. We're talking about the election, the uncertainty. Heard from Romaine and Scarlett about maybe it's going to be a week
before we know the outcome. What does this mean is the US getting more isolated, and yet people seem very enthusiastic about the US and investing in this economy. Can you explain how much you're hearing that?
Well, there's certainly been a theme here at the IMF World Bank meetings, and that's been true, particularly actually from foreign clients that I've been talking to foreign policymakers. There's frankly a lot of envy about just how well the US economy has performed over the course of the past two or three years. It wasn't necessarily the expectation that we would have an economy today that has actually been
performing quite well. Now it doesn't perform as well for everybody, and that is clearly an issue that the politicians are grappling with. But for those participants in the stock market, it's been a boom for companies that have been investing in the US. They've been able to benefit from the various strengths of the US offers, energy independence, having a little bit of light industrial policy in the US, labor technology, those things have been a real benefit and a tailwind for the US economy.
There's an issue here where people are talking about maybe the US is going to lose its supremacy in some of these areas, especially given the amount of debt that the United States has and the fact that it will probably have to issue more and the deficit is getting a lot deeper. As someone who sees a lot of the transactions, who processes the transactions of Treasury trades and works with the Federal Reserve, how much are you seeing this?
Well? People do talk, for sure about the fact we have to be humble about the fact that the world can change pretty quickly, and we've had enough reminders of that over the past decade that one has to plan for the future, but one also has to prepare for the worst, and that's good sensible approach to leading a business. We talk to our clients all the time about that looking around the corners. Don't assume that rates are going to move in a certain direction. They could surprise us.
Having said all of that, the benefits that the US has right now are considerable, and that is what we are hearing from our clients. That is what we talk to other policymakers about. Growth really matters at the end of the day for a nation's prosperity. Being able to grow GDP, being able to include as many people as possible in that growth. But you have to have the
growth in order to be able to include people. And so in Europe they're talking about social programs, they're talking about challenges that takes growth in order to be able to pay for it. And so as strong economy is a really valuable benefit to be able to unlock all of those other things. Now, you're right, deficits matter a lot, and in the US we're going to have to confront that.
Other countries have already had to confront those challenges. But we have certain advantages in the US, particularly the fact that we're a reserve currency that we have the US treasuries, is that that sort of risk free reference rate instrument of choice. Those are again advantages, can't be taken for granted, can't be complacent, but things that have been helpful to the United States.
Robin Well, just to pick up on that point, with the election less than two weeks away here in the US, are there policy proposals, policy prescriptions that you've heard from either of the candidates that you'd think that B and Y needs to prepare for now rather than later.
Well, We're always preparing. It's our job to do that. We help our clients prepare. It's our platforms that ultimately our clients look to in order to be able to move forward. The work that we do in the treasury market is a great example. And so to be specific for a second, both sides of the aisle have talked
about wanting to be able to spend more. It is likely under both plans that deficits would raise, and so with that need to be able to pay for it, and so making sure that we're prepared, our platforms are prepared to be able to handle more treasuries. We settle twenty trillion dollars worth of treasuries earlier this week on our platforms, and so that's got to be able to scale.
We feel comfortable we can. I think in the US treasury market in particular, one of the important things is going to be the question of where the buyer is going to be because there are a lot of governments looking to raise funds, the US among them, but not the only one, and the private sector wants to fund as well. Remember we've got an energy transition, to invest in data centers, to pay for infrastructure, to pay for the focus on the grid and all of the work
that's going to be required for that. Those things cost money, that's financing and we need buyers for that.
So then circling back then to your own business and the growth, particularly that we saw out of the last earning support, I think you're now above fifty trillion dollars in assets under custody, assuming that continues to grow. Where is that growth coming from, Robin, or at least where is the growth that you're targeting.
Well, the growth in our company ultimately comes from our clients and readying our platforms to be able to serve them. Well, you mentioned we are the world's largest custodian. We're also the world's largest collateral manager and largest issuer services firm. That helps to service all of that debt that we were just talking about. With the world's largest securities lender, we have two trillion dollars worth of asset management firm. So all of those platforms and being able to help
more of those platforms helped more of our clients. That for us is the growth path. That's what we've been executing this year, and that so far has been able to power our growth. But we also think it'll power our future.
How much, Robin, are you looking at past ale acquisitions.
Well, you've got acquisitions always have to be on the radar screen. We actually announced an acquisition about two months ago to buy Archer, which is a specific provider of managed accounts, which is one of the fastest growing areas of the asset management business. We felt that our platforms could benefit from that team their technology to be able to speed our growth. We're very excited about that. We expected to close this quarter and that's an important part
of the story. And so we're scanning the horizon. That's a good example of it, looking for things that will speed us on our growth journey and will help us to serve our clients even better in areas of the market that are growing and may be where the puck's going.
Robin Vince, thank you so much for being with us. Robin Vince, the CEO of V and yat Melon