BNY Mellon: Global Custodian of Assets

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK (Trefis) -- BNY Mellon's (BNY) stock dropped a bit after the firm missed analyst estimates in its first quarter earnings report on April 19.

BNY Mellon primarily competes with State Street (STT), JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Citigroup (C) in providing investment services including asset servicing, issuer services, clearing services and investment management services to institutional investors and high-net worth individuals around the world.

Despite the recent quarterly results, we maintain a $35.76 price estimate for BNY Mellon's stock, about 25% above market price. We project healthy growth for the firm's asset servicing arm.

BNY Mellon is the largest custodian of assets in the world with $25 trillion worth of assets under custody. The asset servicing fees that BNY Mellon earns on its AuC represent the largest revenue stream for the firm, contributing more than 20% of the firm's $13.8 billion revenues in 2010.

While we believe that asset servicing fees as a percentage of AuC will remain constant at current levels of 0.11% going forward, these fees will get a lift from our projected increase in BNY Mellon's assets under custody to over $43 trillion by the end of our forecast period.

BNY Mellon should continue to do well this area. As investors increasingly invest in cross-border assets, emerging markets and more complex financial instruments, they will require the presence of large global custodians above local/regional players or financial service providers' in-house investment servicing teams.

This will have a positive impact on BNY Mellon, which is already the largest custodian in the world with a presence in over 100 financial markets and over 25 countries.

In addition, in many countries, the state is withdrawing from its role as a primary pension provider, causing citizens to invest in defined-contribution pension plans and mutual funds. Since custody providers serve institutional investors like mutual and pension funds, this development creates promising growth prospects for custodians' assets under custody.

See our complete analysis of BNY Mellon stock here.

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This commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet guest contributor program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of TheStreet or its management.