Trends in asset management are consolidation, growth of alternatives and the need for scale and talent according to Sareena Dalla Brookshire, chief product officer at BNY Mellon Pershing.
At the end of May this year BNY Mellon Pershing announced the appointment of Dalla Brookshire in the newly created role of chief product officer and member of Pershing’s executive committee.
Dalla Brookshire told Markets Media that her role involves leading the end-to-end global development and execution of BNY Mellon Pershing’s product strategy, which includes cash solutions, retirement solutions, lending solutions, financial solutions, client portals, as well as a new client product consulting organisation.
“I oversee the team as part of my remit and I am ultimately responsible for ensuring that we have the right investment in our core product lineup,” she added. “We want to ensure we are aligned with our business strategy and, ultimately, that we are continuing to drive innovation in our industry.”
Before BNY Mellon Pershing, Dalla Brookshire worked at The Vanguard Group, where she most recently served as head of strategic planning and new offer adoption for its advice business. Prior to Vanguard, Dalla Brookshire designed and launched the Retirement Institute and Retirement Center at BlackRock as vice president of digital.
Dalla Brookshire continued that she had not been looking for a new role, but after conversations with people across BNY Mellon, she discovered the breadth and impact that the enterprise has across the global financial ecosystem, touching 20% of the world’s investable assets.
“I have had a non-linear career path across industries and functions but the connective piece across all of those roles is that I have always been drawn to building opportunities that sit at the intersection of strategy and product innovation, and transformation,” she added.
During her time at BlackRock and Vanguard, which was over nearly a decade, Dalla Brookshire said she led product and growth teams, built solutions that helped millions build financial literacy, improve financial health, start investing and achieve their goals
“I helped stand up agile transformation and build out new product management capabilities with the organisations,” she added. “Both of these firms have been instrumental in shaping how I think about strategy, scaling and leadership.”
Since starting her new role, Dalla Brookshire said she has spent a lot of time listening, learning and trying to understand the organisational goals and priorities of the various constituencies across Pershing, the broader BNY Mellon ecosystem and the needs of clients.
Trends
She sees three trends in asset management – consolidation, growth of alternatives and the need for scale and talent.
“We are seeing M&A within the industry and the impact that’s having on wealth management and their technology platforms,” she added.
Dalla Brookshire cited one report that found that 41% of wealth managers see the streamlining of their technology as a critical priority. The firm intends to evolve its wealth management tech platform for Pershing clients by building out an integrated bank trust and custody solution, alongside a leading advisory platform.
In addition, the firm will continue to bring together investment expertise from across the group.
“We will continue to expand our proprietary solutions like cash management and direct indexing, as well as more solutions such as BondWise,” she said. “We think an end-to-end wealth management platform could be really game changing.”
In September this year BNY Mellon Pershing announced the debut of BondWise on its NetX360+ platform to allow advisors to research and trade bonds and other fixed-income securities in real time. The tool was developed in collaboration with bondIT, a fintech that uses data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to create tools for the fixed income market and Dalla Brookshire believes that working with fintechs will also present other opportunities.
She cited another report which found that at the end of last year alternatives were about $20 trillion of global assets under management. Dalla Brookshire believes there is a tremendous opportunity for BNY Mellon Pershing to provide an end-to-end offering in private markets covering product, infrastructure, and data in order to create more access to the asset class.
“Ultimately, we want to make sure that it is very easy for clients to interface with us, to have a very elegant experience, and find the products they need and for their operational outcomes, as well as investment outcomes for their clients,” she added.
The firm aims to provide more data, reporting and analytics tools and more personalized menus in client portals. She gave the example of providing a site builder capability which allows clients to control and build their own branded sites without having to learn code.
“In addition to our scale, our ability to be configurable and customizable is a differentiator in terms of how we help our clients meet their needs,” Dalla Brookshire added.
In 12 months time, Dalla Brookshire said she would like to have improved the user experience and built out the wealth management technology platform.
“Those are some of the things where I really want to make sure we are moving the needle,” she added.
