The Bank of New York Mellon, the world's largest custodian of financial assets, aims to expand in Russia, India and China, potentially through new acquisitions, a top executive at the bank said. Russia has already become the world's biggest net issuer of foreign-traded shares through the bank this year, while issuance in the developed world continues to stagnate or shrink.
"It's just going to be the BRICs that are growing," Senior Executive Vice President Karen Peetz told Reuters in an interview. "We are already large enough in Brazil, but not as large as we need to be in the other BRICs," she said.
"You will probably hear about us looking at strategic acquisitions in our space, meaning security servicing and asset management, and possibly in new spaces that would make the company slightly more diversified," she added. The bank, which stayed profitable through the crisis, remains flush with cash for acquisitions. It was among the first cleared to repay US government bailout funds, returning $3 billion to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
"Paying off TARP was a very big thing because you wouldn't have been able to have strategic acquisitions with it," said Peetz, who is also chief executive of the bank's financial markets and treasury services division. "We are in a much better position than most of our peers.
The Bank of New York Mellon was in the running for Barclays Global Investors but lost out to Blackrock, and was named as one of three bidders for Citigroup's Japanese asset management unit in a Nikkei report.