This CEO fosters a data-oriented company culture

How is technology impacting your business? We’ve always delivered core processing technology to support our clients’ clearing, settlement and custody needs, but now we are extending technology across the entire investment process. We’re about to deliver an open-source, cloud-based digital ecosystem called NEXEN, which delivers capabilities from all parts of BNY Mellon through a single gateway to our clients. The platform includes an API store that lets clients co-develop and integrate with us, using their own applications. It also allows us to integrate with third-party service providers, and reduces our clients’ vendor management and integration costs by making the integration process turnkey.

How is technology improving the employee experience? We recently launched MySource Social, an expansion of our intranet, which our employees use to create communities of interest and collaborate in a very different way. It allows people to solve problems, share information and have conversations globally; it binds our company together and allows us to learn from each other more easily.

How are you using data? We’re pushing more information to our employees and managers through an analytics application we call MyDashboard. We put all the information a manager needs to be productive, whether that’s employee performance management, expense management, or travel and entertainment approvals, into a comprehensive dashboard that’s easy to access and understand.

We’re always finding new ways to turn big data into advantage for our clients. In the wake of the financial crisis, tri-party repo-processing became a source of systemic risk, so we worked with regulators and industry participants to reduce that risk by re-engineering the technology that supports those processes.

We used that same technology to improve our clients’ operating efficiency and reduce their cost per trade. We then provided them with new algorithmic tools that allowed them to optimize their collateral and improve their profitability. We’re also using big data to share information about mutual fund flow and distribution analytics, which is very valuable to asset managers.

What role does your CIO play in data innovation? Our business people know what information is meaningful to them, but not how to access that information across a complex set of applications. Our CIO, Suresh Kumar, understands what the businesses are looking for and delivers that information in a common and cost-effective way. Suresh is intellectually curious and stays current on technology and business model changes. He doesn’t just respond to business requests; he comes up with transformative technology solutions that go well beyond what the business originally asked for.

What in the world of technology is particularly exciting to you? We all have to figure out how to do more with less. Machine learning is particularly exciting to me because it means we can eliminate a lot of repetitive work that isn’t exciting for people to do and doesn’t add a lot of value to the business. Machine learning lets our talented people work on things that make a difference.