BNY Mellon CEO: Caution on Emerging Tech Can’t Spell Complacency

What You Need to Know

The firm’s $3.5 billion annual tech budget is money well spent, Robin Vince says.

If one could use a single fact or figure to underscore the importance of technology development for the financial services industry today, BNY Mellon’s annual tech spend would be a good choice.

According to BNY Mellon President and CEO Robin Vince, the firm has put more than $3.5 billion into technology innovation in the last year alone, and that figure is unlikely to fall in the years ahead as the global organization strives to develop and integrate new capabilities for its staff and clients.

Vince made that case during a keynote address given before some 2,000 of BNY Mellon Pershing’s wealth management clients gathered for the firm’s Insite conference in Orlando. Sharing the stage with Alicia Levine, head of investment strategy and equity advisory solutions, Vince argued BNY Mellon’s massive investment in technology is a clear reflection of the times.

Wealth Tech in Focus

Simply put, Vince and Levine said, clients all across BNY Mellon’s many lines of business are demanding such innovation, in large part because their own client-service needs and operations have become so much more complex and demanding.

According to the pair, this outlook will bring its challenges, but it will also bring major opportunities for growth, both for firms like BNY Mellon Pershing and for its clients.

In addition to highlighting the big tech announcements the firm has made this week at the conference — particularly the launch of a new wealth management platform called Wove — Vince also took time to contextualize some of the hottest technology topics driving deep discussions inside and outside the world of wealth management.

He argued that emerging technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence and blockchain ledger technology, are not just flashy news items that can be expected to fade into the background. Rather, they represent the start of a new era of profound advancement that will very likely reshape the world of global finance — and many other walks of life.

The big takeaway for Vince and Levine? Caution about such emerging technologies is warranted, but caution can’t spell complacency for firms that want to thrive in the years and decades ahead.

How Vince Views AI

Responding to a general query from Levine, Vince said artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are an important area of investment across the entire BNY Mellon organization — and that a lot has already been accomplished.

Investing to Empower Advisors

Stepping back from the topic of AI, Vince said BNY Mellon will continue to invest in whatever technology capabilities will benefit the firm’s clients, and he said the scale of the organization will make that investment hard to match.

“Frankly, we have the ability and the expertise to make really powerful investments in all of these areas, and we are doing just that,” Vince said. “To give you some perspective, we spend about $3.5 billion per year on our technology upkeep and development.”

Vince said the launch of the Wove platform is just the most recent example of the firm “building to get ahead of the emerging trends and needs of our clients.”

“The goal in this kind of work is to solve the problems that are emerging — the problems that people are increasingly going to encounter,” Vince said. “That’s where a good strategy and a good ability to listen to and understand the needs of our clients comes into play, whether within Pershing or in any other part of the business.

“I often say to our people that we can’t have a crystal ball to see the future. That’s not possible, but we can have a crystal ball to see the present if we take advantage of all of the information at our fingertips. Through our scale, we can see trends coming into the marketplace, and we can innovate to stay ahead of them.”