Digitization critical to handling $45trln assets: BNY Mellon

“We custodize and administer $45 trillion of the world’s assets, we manage upwards of $2.5 trillion of assets, we clear on behalf of governments $5 trillion a day of securities that are coming through our systems,” he said.

“We have had a very clear strategy for a number of years now, and we are executing on it very deliberately and with determination, and that strategy is to digitize the platforms that we function on,” Kablawi said.

“Our payment flows are one of the largest in the world,” he added.

Kablawi said that digitization enables better, faster and more insightful data, enabling its clients to make more informed decisions, investment, risk, operational oversight and marketing and distributing decisions.

“We invest assets on behalf of clients, mainly for retirement, which means we have to be very careful from a fiduciary perspective in managing those assets,” he said. “The second thing we do is, we enable financial markets. We enable investment managers to invest assets on behalf of retirees and aspiring retirees.”

Kablawi also talked about helping companies to issue debt and equity, and enabling the proper functioning of both the securities markets and the payments markets, on behalf of asset managers, namely, banks, broker dealers, pension funds, insurance companies, alternative investment managers.

BNY Mellon and SNB Capital, a unit of Saudi National Bank, launched global securities services capabilities for institutional and large asset owners based in Saudi Arabia in August of this year.

The launch followed an alliance signed between the American investment bank and SNB Capital (previously called NCB Capital) in October last year.

This partnership is aimed at addressing the demand to embrace the global best practices of segregated asset management, brokerage and custody functions following the introduction of Saudi’s Independent Custody Model in 2017.

Kablawi told Arab News he considered the investment bank to be “the global champion in the business model that we operate and SNB Capital is a local champion across investment management and investment services”.

“We’ve put our hands together so that we get the best of BNY Mellon globally and SNB Capital locally as a national champion, in reaching and supporting institutional investors here in the Kingdom,” he said.