PNC Bank 2004 Annual Report Download - page 6

Our wealth and asset management businesses made important strides. PNC
Advisors increased its earnings by 19 percent and successfully transitioned its
business model to a relationship management approach, giving clients a single
contact point for all of their dealings with PNC. BlackRock, our asset manage-
ment subsidiary, had an excellent year, increasing assets under management
to $342 billion at year end thanks to strong new mandates, global expansion
and market appreciation.
And our processing business, PFPC, produced exceptional results given the
stiff challenges it faced, including weak equity market trading volumes, price
compression in many products and investigations of the mutual fund industry.
Our success came primarily from an aggressive push into new markets – we
increased offshore assets serviced by more than a third, for example – and
disciplined cost control.
The road ahead
Our achievements in 2004, however outstanding, are by now long in the past.
I am eager, as are all of my colleagues at PNC, to move forward. We have built
a powerful engine for growth. Now our challenge, both simple and complex,
is execution.
Our business mix provides sustainable diversity of revenues – from fees and
interest, and from a broad range of products and services. We win business
across wide swaths of the world: with retail banking customers in our six-
state region, with secured lending and real estate clients around the country,
with asset management and processing clients across continents. And our
resources – capital and assets – are as well managed as ever. In short, we
have created our own potential.
Here is how we will realize it. First, we will make PNC a far more efficient
operator; we will do all we can to streamline our organization so that nothing
interferes with the service we provide our customers or our ability to attract
profitable new relationships. This perseverance on behalf of the customer will
be a unifying theme at PNC; we will rededicate ourselves to solving customer
problems, to helping our customers build their businesses, to earning the
trust of all of our constituents and to delivering to our customers the full and
formidable power of PNC.
42004 PNC Summary Annual Report
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
4Q
04
3Q
04
2Q
04
1Q
04
4Q
03
DEPOSITS
$ billions
At quarter end
First, we will make PNC
a far more efficient
operator; we will do all
we can to streamline
our organization so that
nothing interferes with
the service we provide our
customers or our ability
to attract profitable new
relationships.