BNP Paribas’ securities services delivered a standout performance in 2024 and into the first quarter of 2025, keeping up momentum and innovation in its European markets.
The bank’s diversified, multi-local model, operating proprietary custody and fund-administration capabilities in 27 European and global markets, translated into the strongest first-quarter revenue performance among the industry’s big five custodians: group revenue rose 9.4 % year-on-year.
Transaction volumes, buoyed by heightened market volatility at European sell-side clients, jumped 26%, while private-capital servicing revenue grew roughly 20% as the bank continued to ride a continental wave of infrastructure and re-industrialisation investment.
“Our diversified, multi-local model – patiently built over 15 years – has delivered outstanding results, and gives us confidence for the next decade,” says Patrick Colle, head of securities services and chairman of financial institutions coverage at BNP Paribas, underlining the strategic patience behind the platform’s 2025 performance.
This expansion reflected an asset-agnostic strategy. BNP Paribas now administers €13.25 trillion ($15.51 trillion) of private capital assets, claiming top three local-custodian status across every major European market.
Its dual engine of large global custody mandates from buy-side institutions and sub-custody mandates from European and US broker-dealers has insulated the business from the drag of softer asset valuations, particularly during 2024’s rate-driven repricing. Net interest earnings rose at a double-digit rate last year after the bank renegotiated cash-deposit spreads with virtually its entire European client base.
The bank’s scale positions it to lead industry-wide change and extract efficiency gains akin to those it saw in North America
Product development has kept pace with that commercial advance. The bank’s completely rebuilt client portal, Neolink, went live in 2024, embedding an AI assistant and including a suite of APIs that run from trade settlement through NAV calculation.
For Europe’s fast-growing private assets sector, the bank layered on CapLink, a workflow platform that offers real-time capital calls and other notifications – functionality that is still absent at many peers. In public market post-trade, BNPP deepened its relationship with Broadridge to streamline European class-action processing and expanded its equity-services joint venture Proxymity to further automate cross-border proxy voting.
Looking ahead to the region’s 2027 shift to T+1 settlement, executives point to lessons learned as an active member of the US working group and to experience in India’s near-T-0 environment. The bank’s scale positions it to lead industry-wide change and extract efficiency gains akin to those it saw in North America.
The Paris-based house signalled its next frontier on data. A December 2024 alliance with French fintech NeoXam is converting a bespoke investment-data service, already live with two mega European asset owners, into a scalable offering that aggregates portfolio, risk and performance data across dozens of external managers.
“The next frontier is becoming a master data custodian, giving asset owners a single, scalable platform to aggregate performance, risk and reporting across all of their external managers,” says Colle, outlining a vision that fuses custody with data mastery in a model that could define the next decade of growth.
