At 240 years old, BNY is the oldest bank in the U.S., but it looks more like a young upstart when you consider its aggressive approach to utilizing AI across its business.
BNY, which manages $52 trillion in client assets, has 40 production use cases in place and has made its AI assistant available to tens of thousands of employees, while thousands are taking advantage of the AI tools to build agents of their own. The bank’s software developers have aggressively embraced Microsoft Copilots as well. Those are key indicators of usage shared by Leigh-Ann Russell, CIO and global head of engineering for BNY, during the Microsoft AI Tour in New York Thursday.
“I think the most important message I would take away from this is that AI is not just for engineers. It’s for each and every one of us, enabling us to be a little more productive each and every day,” said Russell, who spoke as part of the event’s keynote with Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president, Cloud and AI. (Russell and Guthrie are pictured above)
Eliza is the BNY Enterprise AI platform built on large language models including GPT-4 and hosted on Microsoft Azure. It was born out of BNY’s AI Hub in 2023, leveraging the work of a multi-disciplinary team within the bank. Eliza, as well as the company’s overall AI strategy, is underpinned by three strategic pillars: to run the bank better operationally, to enhance client service, and to transform the company culture.
Russell detailed use cases tied to each of these pillars:
Operational improvements: The bank is improving risk management and operational efficiency by using Eliza for anomaly detection. Russell notes the importance of precision in managing trillions of dollars in assets; Eliza actively looks for security anomalies while also helping to manage the amount of false positive notifications that are received.
Client service and engagement: Eliza is being employed for predictive trade analytics to offer near real-time trade settlement insights, and so that settlement risks can be identified early and the bank can mitigate the impact of any late settlements.
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Cultural transformation: Russell detailed the scope of Eliza’s deployment in terms of number of employees trained, actively using, and building with the company’s AI platform. Each of the bank’s 50,000+ employees has access to Eliza, while 22,000 are fully trained and 50% of that latter number are sufficiently advanced in its usage that they are building agents. In the development organization, 80% of the bank’s software developers are using GitHub Copilot daily, and the bank also is in process of rolling out tens of thousands of Copilot 365 licenses. All are indicators of how the bank is reinventing itself to be competitive and drive better performance by leveraging AI.
Russell shared her perspective on milestones reached to date, and the outlook for 2025. “2024 was really about building blocks: building the AI Hub, launching our firm-wide upskilling program to really drive AI adoption and partnering to deliver the first wave of AI solutions into production. But despite being really proud of having 40 production cases, we are really just getting started.
“It’s absolutely no doubt that AI is going to change the landscape in financial services. And if you really adopt it at your core as we’re doing, if you really think about how you can build it into your operation cycle, then I think the key is to not just stay ahead of the wave of transformation, but really actively shape it.”
Russell noted that the company’s partnership with Microsoft — on AI, Azure services, and more — is central to its success and said the partnership includes BNY providing product feedback as well as evaluating new features that will not only benefit BNY but the broader financial services industry.
Change Management Imperative
BNY’s Russell was one of many financial services executives sharing their AI journeys during the Microsoft AI Tour.
A panel discussion featuring top financial services tech execs also delivered insights into business, technical, and cultural priorities that are guiding their AI initiatives. One of those speakers, Angie Ruan, CTO, Capital Access Platforms at Nasdaq, detailed her firm’s five AI pillars (data management, cloud, security, governance, and culture) but noted that “the most fundamental thing is data management,” which she described as spanning data quality, who has access to data, and how they access data.
These early, leading-edge customers are an excellent indicator of the successes that can be achieved with AI Agents and Copilots, and the discipline required to realize that success: maintaining focus on governance, guardrails, data quality, ROI analysis, and more.
One topic that comes up repeatedly in such discussions is the focus on people, the impact on their roles, the need for upskilling, and cultural transformation. That’s broadly being referred to as organizational change management and without a focus on this practice, it’s clear from these financial services leaders that AI initiatives could start with a big splash but fail to realize their considerable potential.
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