BNY doubles down on AI investments amid operating model overhaul

The BNY has increased its investments in artificial intelligence as it begins moving its employees over to a new platform’s operating model, according to the firm’s CEO.

Back in November 2023, the 240-year-old bank made a bullish case for AI at the BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference. It continued to wax lyrical about the many potential use cases of AI for banks in the first quarter of 2024, when executives revealed that the bank was deploying the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, an AI data center infrastructure designed for enterprises. Shortly afterward, the firm unveiled Eliza, a hub-and-spoke proprietary AI tool enabling employees of the firm to build virtual assistants to help ease their workloads.

Since then, however, it has largely been silent on the benefits of the technology. That changed today.

Speaking to investors on the bank’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Robin Vince said that the bank still believes in the potential of AI. “We haven’t made a lot of noise about it, but don’t misunderstand that for a lack of interest or investment. Because we haven’t slowed down—in fact, we’ve increased our AI investment,” Vince said.

Vince said that the bank has established an AI hub, which houses around 100 employees. He added that the technology could offer revenue opportunities when integrated with client offerings, but could also make BNY employees more efficient.

Also, on the call, Vince said that BNY is transitioning towards a new platform operating model, aimed at “enhancing the connectivity across our teams and empowering our people to drive change across the company.”

In practice, this involves creating a single access point for related capabilities and departments at the firm, Vince said. One quarter of the bank’s employees have now transitioned onto the new platform, with another wave set to migrate in Q1 2025. Vince told investors that AI would play a part in the bank’s new operating model once the migration is complete.

In September, BNY also announced the launch of a private markets platform for wealth managers. The platform, called Alts Bridge, connects wealth intermediaries with a network of private markets asset managers, including Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and Aviva Investors. It also provides market data, custody, and clearing for private markets assets.

Reliable private markets data is harder to acquire than public markets data, and the lower disclosure requirements in the sector make the process of data extraction and aggregation more arduous.

Although BNY executives did not comment on the potential use of AI within the firm’s new private markets platform on the call, technologists say generative AI could significantly improve the data collection process in the space.

Speaking to WatersTechnology for a previous article, Noel Calhoun, CTO of alternatives data provider Canoe Intelligence, said that Gen AI could soon replace robotic process automation in the data extraction process for private markets. In the current RPA process, a web browser is automatically scripted to log into company sites and pull datasets on behalf of investors.

“With an autonomous agent powered by an LLM, you can provide more generalized instructions [like], ‘Figure out how to log in. Figure out, once you log in, where the new files are. Figure out how to download those files,’” Calhoun said. “That’s, I think, a very promising approach, that will definitely end up replacing RPA in the future.”