“It is our goal to improve the firm's pre-tax margin to 33% and our ROTCE to 23% over the medium-term, while maintaining a strong balance sheet.”

In context

“g quantitative tightening puts further downward pressure on deposit balances. We intend to keep expenses excluding notable items, roughly flat in 2024. And finally, with regard to capital management, we expect to return north of 100% of 2024 earnings to common shareholders through dividends and buybacks. As Robin discussed earlier, 2023 was a foundational year for us. We took decisive actions to demonstrate some early evidence of our ability to deliver stronger financial performance, and importantly, we've developed a clear roadmap for our multi-year transformation. Over the next couple of slides, we'll provide you our medium-term financial targets for the firm and some of the most impactful actions we're taking to keep delivering on our goals. Page 15 summarizes our consolidated targets. It is our goal to improve the firm's pre-tax margin to 33% and our ROTCE to 23% over the medium-term, while maintaining a strong balance sheet. I'll double-click on our business segments in a moment, but along our three strategic pillars, there are a number of teams that transcend our lines of business and segments. Robin mentioned several updates when he talks about our progress in 2023, so I'll highlight just a few with them. The first is our enhanced commercial model. We're driving a new culture of commerciality to deliver all of BNY Mellon in a unified front to facilitate deeper client relationships with solutions from across the firm. With our clients at the center, our module is led by client coverage teams with clear accountability to retain business, expand revenue into new areas and drive client satisfaction. Our new sales operations and enablement organization, the client coverage practice, will make it easier for our c”