State Street’s approach to information technology has developed from our singular focus on meeting the needs of global institutional investors. Creating operational scale and efficiency is critical to our ability to deliver value for our clients, and as such, we have closely aligned our business model with our IT strategy. Members of our IT leadership are embedded within the business lines, helping prioritize project development, ensuring business goals are met and leveraging synergies wherever possible.
With more than 6,900 information technology (IT) employees and contractors worldwide, we’ve structured our IT community in a way that not only fosters teamwork, but actually depends on it. Establishing centers of excellence in key locations around the world, we achieve greater processing efficiencies, capitalize on our global scale and optimize IT best practices with IT resources available around the clock. The result is technology that connects clients to the marketplace, provides them with valuable investment information and helps make them more productive.
Message from the CIO
Christopher Perretta
Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer
State Street’s clients are among the world's most sophisticated global investors, and our deep, long-term relationships with them are a strategic advantage for us. They trust us with large volumes of assets and rely on us as the collaborative partner they need to reach their goals.
To enrich these relationships, we continue to develop and deploy timely, effective and consistently superior business solutions that deliver maximum value to our clients worldwide. We are focused more than ever on ensuring that State Street's information technology (IT) vision and business strategy are aligned with our clients' demands and needs.
Our guiding tenets in State Street's IT organization are responsiveness, quality, timeliness, productivity and accountability. Adhering to these tenets enables us to develop the IT solutions that solve business problems for our clients, strengthen our position in the markets we serve and position State Street for future growth.
Technology is a fundamental part of everything we do at State Street, and we have a long track record of being a technology leader. Historically we have devoted between 20 and 25 percent of our full-year operating expenses to technology development, helping to ensure we can respond nimbly to the rapid rates of change in the industry. We have a strong process in place for prioritizing IT spending involving participation among the business leaders who set the strategic direction for the company. We also have a culture of informed, collaborative cross-organizational decision-making and action where we continuously share innovations and knowledge to meet the challenges of today's complex technology environment.
We understand that technology leadership requires an organizational commitment to leveraging skills, resources and expertise wherever they reside. Further, we know that supporting current business initiatives while seizing new opportunities for using leading-edge technologies is the path to creating innovative solutions to business challenges today and in the future.
All of this ultimately serves to benefit our clients, who have always counted on us to provide the technology tools and support they need to achieve their objectives. It is our focus on providing meaningful benefits to our clients that will extend our proud track record of technological expertise and leadership in the months and years to come.