BNY deepens AI, digital asset embrace as it enters next phase: CEO Robin Vince tells BT

[SINGAPORE] Three years into its 10-year transformation plan, BNY is entering its next phase of change. It will deepen artificial intelligence (AI) integration into operations and a pick-up in speed of transformation to better serve clients, said chief executive Robin Vince in an exclusive interview with The Business Times during a recent visit to Singapore in November.

For the bank’s employees in Asia, which is BNY’s fastest-growing region outside of the US in terms of sales, the changes also mean investments in its offices and employees to enable more growth opportunities, Vince said.

“Absolutely, we view ourselves as growing in Asia-Pacific,” he said. “I don’t think that automatically translates to huge numbers of people. I don’t think the two (business growth and manpower growth) are as linear as they used to be.”

Within the next four to five months, the bank will move its Singapore offices to Marina One East Tower from its current location in Millenia Tower, he revealed.

The move is part of the company’s global transformation efforts that include investments in its culture and office facilities, he said. Two-thirds of 50,000 people are working in offices that have been significantly renovated or are brand new in the past three years, he said.

Taking the AI leap

Since Vince took the helm in 2022, the bank has embarked on a massive transformation that includes streamlining client services, heavy investments in AI, and reorganising the bank’s operating model.

The company’s annual tech spend is roughly US$3.8 billion, much of which goes into AI. In October, the firm launched Eliza 2.0, an enterprise AI platform that connects to various large language models from which it receives its intelligence.

The platform helps employees solve client challenges, Vince said. Already, it has shrunk client onboarding wait times from two weeks to a few working days by improving know-your-customer and quality control processes.

In the past, clients had to provide information through various compliance forms across different systems. Now, documents can go through a centralised review process assisted by Eliza, which “takes that information and does about 80 per cent of everything that’s required to onboard the customer to go live much more quickly”, he said.

The bank also has an AI solution in production that provides a risk mitigation service in its US Treasury settlements business where it predicts events that might happen later in the day to help clients take pre-emptive action, he shared.

“It’s really based off… an incredible history of data. Remember the scale of the businesses that we actually are in. So we have this huge custody store of data. We have all of the settlement activity. We have the instructions. The scale and breadth of what BNY actually sees in a day across all of those different businesses is remarkable,” he explained.

“So as a result of that – the Treasury market’s a good example – we’re able to predict not only the price changes of what’s going to happen, but actually the settlement behaviour of what happens if client A has done a trade with client B and something’s happened with client C and they didn’t deliver,” he said.

No gain without pain

The transformation efforts seem to be paying off for BNY. The bank’s Q3 revenue increased 9 per cent year on year to hit a record of US$5.1 billion. Its stock price is also up 54.2 per cent in the year to date, far exceeding the S&P 500’s 16.3 per cent growth.

However, this performance comes with its fair share of pain.

The total headcount across the firm has “reduced a little bit” over the past few years “just because we are running the company more efficiently and have natural attrition as well”, Vince said.

In 2023, BNY cut 1,500 staff, which accounted for around 3 per cent of the workforce. In 2024, severance expenses fell slightly to US$240 million from US$267 million in 2023, based on BNY’s annual report.

At the same time, the firm has made new hires, including those in the AI field. It now has “hundreds of AI engineers” who work on building, maintaining and deploying AI solutions, Vince said.

The firm has also invested more in recruitment, he said. “Graduate recruitment from universities – from 2022 to 2024, we doubled the size of our global analyst class,” he said.

Naturally, employees might have some anxieties about being displaced by AI. But managing these worries boils down to investments in culture and the communications approach, Vince said.

“The overall investment in our culture has been a very important part of our success, and allowed us to go faster on many things than we otherwise would have, including on AI,” Vince said. “Because our people are excited about AI instead of fearful about AI, we are going faster in AI.”

“One of the things that we’ve done as part of culture is we’ve completely reinvented our communications approach… We have a quarterly BNY Live – a global town hall that we really invest in – and monthly MD (managing director) meetings. We have leadership forums for different levels of the company,” he added.

Regarding AI fears, he added: “We have been growing. If we can grow more quickly because of AI, that’s exciting to us. We’re not trying to shrink. We’re not trying to use AI to eliminate lots of jobs. That’s not what we want to do. We want to use AI to make our people able to do more things, because we’ve got a long list of things that we want to do. AI increases our capacity to be able to do more, and that’s exciting.”

Embracing digital assets

In November, BNY released a paper that stated digital assets and cryptocurrencies are moving from experimental to foundational as institutional adoption increases.

The bank has released several products and services, including the ability to provide custody services for digital assets such as Bitcoin. BNY also has the ability to support some stablecoins, which allows them to help clients with both conventional and digital assets.

In August, Singapore-headquartered blockchain platform OpenEden chose BNY as investment manager and primary custodian for the underlying assets of its tokenised US Treasury Bills Fund.

“We view (blockchain) as an important technology. We view it as something that will live side by side with traditional assets.

“With tokenisation technology and blockchain technology, we think it is useful for some types of use cases, particularly to be able to speed up settlement and mobility, to be able to handle assets which aren’t very well-handled by the traditional financial system,” he added.

On why institutional interest in tokenised and other blockchain-based assets is picking up only now, Vince said one of the reasons was the maturing of the technology that was required.

“Bitcoin is popular for store of value, but the network wasn’t really the right one for some types of transactions. So new networks needed to be created,” he said.

A change in tone and political leadership in the US also led to a change in the regulatory tone, he added.

BNY noted that momentum for digital assets is building in Apac as some markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan have rolled out licensing regimes and proactive frameworks that balance innovation with robust risk management.

“These developments show Apac’s commitment to a secure digital asset ecosystem, leading in regulatory clarity and stablecoins adoption,” the spokesperson said.