LAS VEGAS – With artificial intelligence doubling its computing power every 100 days, according to the World Economic Forum, the biggest hindrance to AI adoption isn’t limits to its capabilities, BNY CEO Robin Vince said.
“It’s actually going to be human adoption and culture and potentially organizational inertia that will get in the way,” Vince said Tuesday in a fireside chat at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas.
“My mantra on this is, AI is for everyone, everywhere, everything at BNY,” he said.
The bank has been big on AI adoption, launching its proprietary AI platform Eliza in 2024 to improve employee workflows and client service, and allowing employees to create AI agents for specific tasks. At present, around 15,000 employees have built their own agents, and the bank is in the process of building some 150 AI-powered solutions to solve problems throughout the organization.
The bank recently began offering AI training to community bankers, too.
BNY has a history of embracing innovation, Vince said Tuesday: The firm got its first computer 70 years ago and started doing business primarily via computer 50 years ago, he said. Thirty years ago, BNY began using the internet to process transactions.
“If you stick your head in the sand and ignore what’s going on around you with the technology of the day, then you’re going to become obsolete very quickly, and history is littered with firms of all industries that are living examples of that,” he said.
Around 1,000 BNY employees have received more than 40 hours of training in AI. As employees use it more, they “stretch the boundaries” of what they thought was possible, Vince noted.
“On day one, we do a few simple ChatGPT queries, but then before you know it, as we were talking about, you can actually be pretty thorough in the way that you prompt and interact and actually accomplish a mission with AI in your own life,” he said. “Then they actually can be creative with it. How can we solve a customer problem? How can we deploy AI in a new way? How can we hire a new digital employee to perform some new set of tasks? And that gets very exciting for people.”
“They can create, in our opinion, a flywheel of excitement associated with their AI adoption at the company, and then feed it with training and tools. It's a very powerful thing to be able to do,” Vince said.
So, too, has BNY embraced digital assets. It became the first U.S.-based global systemically important bank to custody crypto in 2022, and now custodies three coins (Circle’s USDC, SocGen’s CoinVertible and Ripple’s RLUSD).
Vince said he has a “very rudimentary perspective on that, which is, if there's going to be more stuff in the world, we want to look after it,” he said. “We are the world's largest looker-after of stuff.”
BNY looks at blockchain and distributed ledger technology as “an opportunity to be able to reinvent … the processes that underpin the financial system,” Vince said.
When there are developments that allow money to move faster and more efficiently, liquidity is created, and higher capacity attracts new participants in the market, he said.
