The Bank of New York Mellon is a custody bank rather than a lender to the public. Its core business is holding and servicing financial assets for institutions: safekeeping securities, settling trades, handling corporate actions, calculating fund valuations and moving payments between institutions. Alongside that it runs an investment management arm and a clearing and custody platform used by wealth advisers. Revenue is a mix of fees earned on the value of assets under custody and administration and net interest income on client cash balances, which makes results sensitive both to the level of markets and to where short term interest rates sit.