Northern Trust (NTRS) Q4 2025 Earnings Transcript

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Thu, January 22, 2026 astatine 9:31 AM CST 46 min read

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Thursday, January 22, 2026 astatine 9:00 a.m. ET

• Chairman and Chief Executive Officer — Michael O’Grady

• Chief Financial Officer — David W. Fox

• Head of Investor Relations — Jennifer Childe

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Michael O’Grady: Thank you, Jennifer. Let maine articulation successful welcoming you to our 4th fourth 2025 net call. Turning to Slide four, successful 2025, we made important advancement executing connected our One Northern Trust strategy. Delivering beardown and improving fiscal show and providing coagulated momentum going into 2026. In the 4th quarter, compared to the anterior year, spot fees grew 7%, nett involvement income accrued 14%, and gross was up 9%, excluding notables. For the sixth consecutive quarter, we delivered affirmative spot interest and full operating leverage portion continuing to put meaningfully successful the business. Excluding notables, pretax borderline expanded to 33% and EPS grew 19%.

For the afloat year, gross roseate 7% and expenses grew 5%, delivering implicit 2 points of operating leverage and a 30% pretax margin, 14.8% instrumentality connected equity, and 17% EPS growth, each excluding notables. We returned $1.9 cardinal to shareholders successful 2025, including a grounds $1.3 cardinal of stock repurchases, which reduced stock number by 5%. These results bespeak beardown marketplace conditions and show the spot of our One Northern Trust strategy, which serves arsenic our roadmap to becoming a consistently high-performing institution that delivers meaningful worth for clients, partners, and shareholders. Turning to Slide five, we've made important strides crossed each of our strategical pillars, starting with optimized growth.

We precocious respective initiatives astatine some the endeavor and concern portion levels, resulting successful deepened lawsuit relationships and expanded marketplace stock successful cardinal areas. We broadened our backstage markets footprint crossed the endeavor and further enhanced our superior markets and banking penetration, which present contributes much than one-third of endeavor revenue. These firm-wide efforts amended collaboration crossed our businesses, allowing america to bring the afloat capabilities of Northern Trust to our clients portion accelerating the gait of merchandise improvement and innovation. Turning to productivity.

Michael O’Grady: We initiated important changes to heighten and standard our operations. Our client-centric capableness operating exemplary provides a unified and accordant mode of moving crossed the company, standardizing halfway processes, expanding spans of control, reducing organizational layers, and empowering the wide adoption of AI-driven automation inclusive of our AI level NT Byron. For example, the main operating officer's organization, which encompasses much than fractional of our workforce, accrued managerial spans of power by implicit 35%, portion reducing absorption layers by implicit 20%. This is improving speed, accountability, and ratio crossed the firm, creating a leaner, much agile operating operation and fostering enhanced collaboration.