Technology is the strategic partner for financial services businesses, changing products, services, and operating models, according to Bridget Engle, Chief Operations & Technology Officer, BNY Mellon.
“During the past year, the pandemic has really reinforced the power, the influence that technological advances are having on our industry,” she said, speaking at the Financial Services Summit, part of the digital Google Cloud Summit series.
“If we’re not in the leading edge, and staying a step ahead of our competition, we won’t deliver in the way that we need to for our clients,” she said.
BNY Mellon, a multi-trillion dollar institution, plays a “critical role in the financial services markets,” according to Engle. As of April 16, 2021, BNY Mellon had $41.7trn in assets under custody and/or administration, and $2.2trn in assets under management.
“We facilitate over 3.6 trillion of tri-party collateral and settle 8.6 trillion of US Treasury securities settlements on a daily basis,” she said.
As a result of that, when it comes to key strategic technology and operational investments, the most important consideration is to make sure that the company protects its clients, said Engle.
“To do that, we built a state of the art Cyber, Technology & Operations Center in New York, we call CTOC. For short, it’s a purpose built room with 106 foot visual displays. But the display is a really secondary to the advanced monitoring the artificial intelligence and machine learning built to ensure protection – protect the firm and make sure we’re securing financial markets and providing exceptional service to our clients,” she explained.
“We democratized information that is formerly been locked in separate silos and created transparency to our entire firm. If you think about that, when we have an incident, it’s critical to be able to have that type of information and really giving everyone the same view of what is happening. We implemented intelligent alerts that save critical time when an incident is unfolding,” she said.
“We have over 45,000 deadlines and we monitor major market events like US Treasury options. The industry experienced challenges with the unprecedented volume and volatility that we saw. We’ve navigated those challenges seamlessly,” she added.
When speaking about current trends, Engle mentioned Artificial Intelligence and hyper automation, making a smarter and faster cybersecurity, “especially with the escalating threat landscape and so many remote workers that we have today”.
Looking forward, Engle said there are several “opportunistic trends” that are driving focused investments and new products, services and operating models – in particular cognitive sciences and music gamification, tokenization and blockchain.
“We recently launched a new digital assets unit that will accelerate our development of solutions and capabilities that our clients are really demanding for digital assets, including crypto currencies.”
“This group is developing a client facing prototype to be the industry’s first multi asset digital custodian and have an administrative platform for traditional and digital assets,” she said.
BNY Mellon has also launched a new data and analytics based on client centric data, and introduced new technologies to extend its addressable market with products that treat data as an asset class.
“With these tools, we really believe we’re giving a differentiated experience and the set of capabilities for our clients to be able to support their data scientists and investment managers,” she said.
“We aren’t just delivering innovative data management, we’re marrying that platform with the unique datasets that we have within the BNY Mellon to create toolkits for analytics and applications that we can bring to our clients,“ she stressed.
