Q&A: How BNY Mellon is Preparing for New Financial Regulations in 2022

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

The Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM) is the world’s largest custodial bank and asset servicing company, with offices in 35 countries. Custodial banks are different from traditional commercial banks and as such they go to market differently to meet their customers’ specific needs. Michael King, Director of Enterprise Data Governance for BNYM, spoke at Rocket and ASG’s user conference, EVOLVE21, where he described their role as a “banker’s bank.”

With over $41.7 trillion under custody and/or administration and $2.2 trillion assets under management, BNYM provides investment management and wealth management services to customers all over the world. This means staying on top of complex and diverse financial regulations is critical.

The burden of financial regulations is growing increasingly heavy. From SOX to GLBA, it seems there are endless acronyms by which to abide. With new regulations expected to continue in the coming years, BNYM’s data governance professionals will be focused on ensuring their organization understands and can demonstrate how their data is managed.

Read on for their explanation of how they accomplish this.

Q: What role does data governance play in meeting BNYM’s goals?

A: Financial institutions aim to enhance revenue, reduce expenses, and stay compliant to best serve our customers. Compliance defines how we are able to work with clients and internally to ensure there is integrity in the market space. Our goal is to use data governance processes and technology to respond to and prepare for changes in the regulatory environment. It’s important to understand how compliance issues impact expense reduction. If you look at it from a data quality standpoint, you can see that companies lose about 12% of their revenue to bad data.

Q: An average of 12% means trillions of dollars collectively lost to poor data quality. Why is that taking place? What are the impacts of poor data management?

A: Time and resources spent looking for data, organizing data and preparing it to be more easily digestible all contribute to that figure. Whether it’s to understand the provenance of our data or the net effect of downstream data from point of conception to consumption, it’s critical to maintain data quality and compliance to avoid those expenses or hefty regulatory fines.

Q: What changes will institutions need to make to manage compliance? What results can that bring?

A: As we see these changes in the banking industry over the next few years, we need to look at the tools and technologies we have at our disposal to not only stay compliant but leverage our data more effectively. Companies with better data management perform better – 75% of companies with top tier data cultures are 49% more likely to exceed their revenue targets. McKinsey found that data users spend 30-40% of their time searching for data if a clear inventory is not available.

Q: What are some of the trends in data governance you’re seeing right now?

A: To implement technologies to better support these regulations we need to improve analytical properties. Data governance tools are extremely effective at lineaging data, but there are inefficiencies in how tools are implemented. At BNYM, we’ve lineaged 1,900 applications with Rocket and ASG’s Data Intelligence. The lineage charts we can now produce allow us to support regulatory requirements and show the provenance of data.