BNY Mellon plans to embed digital assets in every line of business

Over the next 12 to 18 months, all divisions of the financial holding company BNY Mellon will expand their digital assets product lineup. In an interview with American Banker, CEO Roman Regelman said that the push into digital assets is a continuation of the group’s digitization strategy.

According to the executive, developing digital assets is a continuation of the digitization strategy. The aim is to digitize every product and client interaction.

The company started developing the direction two years ago amid rising demand. Adoption is proceeding “exclusively slowly” as BNY Mellon looks at innovations from a risk-management perspective rather than as capital expenditure.

Regelman highlighted three vectors for digital assets:

• Include them in all of the company’s products;
• Use blockchain to modernize existing infrastructure;
• Develop new use cases.

Regelman pointed to the potential of tokenization, which he sees as the next wave of securitization — with greater accessibility, simplicity, and in digital form. Assets in this new format could become “more precise and secure,” he added.

“We believe in the power of this technology. We believe that innovations can offer new uses, as well as faster and cheaper access to capital markets. But we do not think this is related to cryptocurrencies. […] Digital assets are a much larger category. Our horizon is long-term,” the CEO of BNY Mellon said.

Regelman declined to give a precise answer on the strategy’s implementation, citing a range of five to twenty years.

When we talk about asset classes, we will say the same about equities, fixed-income assets and digital assets in the same breath. This is how people will use blockchain. It will become normal,” he assured.

In February 2021, BNY Mellon, among the first major financial institutions created a custodial platform for digital assets.

A year later, the organization entered into a partnership with analytics company Chainalysis as part of a risk-management program.

In October 2022, BNY Mellon received approval from the NYDFS to launch a crypto custody service.