BNY CEO Robin Vince on Embracing AI and Navigating Uncertainty

BNY has a storied history. Co-founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 to help New York City recover after the Revolutionary War, it is often referred to as America’s oldest bank. But today, Robin Vince, who became CEO in 2022, insists, “A bank isn't what we are, a bank is something that we have. A bank is something that we use to provide services to our clients.”

Vince joined BNY, which prefers to call itself a financial services company these days, in 2020 and led its global market infrastructure unit before taking the helm. Before that, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs, where he held leadership roles including chief risk officer, treasurer, head of operations, and CEO of Goldman Sachs International Bank.

When BNY Mellon—as it was then known, before rebranding last year—tapped Vince to join, he had been considering working in the tech industry after taking a gap year to spend time with his family. But joining another Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) made sense to him for a number of reasons, he says. “I'd had a lot of engagement with regulators. I'd had some engagement with investors, with shareholders, but I was able to get back to one of the things that I loved, which was clients,” he told TIME during a visit to London. “And I just liked markets.” 

In February, BNY signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that gives it access to the AI company’s most advanced reasoning models and tools such as Deep Research, to enhance BNY’s internal AI platform, Eliza. The deal also allows OpenAI to see how well its models perform at complex tasks in the real world.  

TIME spoke with Vince on March 19 about how he is embracing AI, breaking down silos at BNY, and navigating uncertainty.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

BNY is the oldest bank in America, and in the last couple of years, under your leadership, the stock performance has improved markedly. Did your experiences at Goldman Sachs influence how you're leading BNY?

I think we’re all the product of our upbringings and experiences. As a kid, I had the opportunity to live in the U.K., but also spent a lot of time living in Paris. Then I had the opportunity to move to New York, and so that gave me a little bit of a global sensibility. With the name, “Bank of New York”—America’s oldest bank—it's very easy [to forget], but 40% of our business is outside of the U.S. It's very easy, if you're not careful, to become very centric around a region. And so that upbringing was very helpful to me. The training at Goldman Sachs, which is a terrific organization, and brought a great set of skills to me—I'm the beneficiary of all of that and everything that went before it, but I'm also the beneficiary at BNY of all of the work that my predecessors have done to assemble the set of businesses that we have today. 

And then, of course, our employees. When you're an employee of a firm, you want your firm to be thriving and doing well. So we made everybody a shareholder. So now, not only are employees theoretically excited about the journey. They're economically excited about the journey as well. We've re-imagined how we work and our platforms operating model as part of that strategy. We've re-imagined some of the members of the team, and we've hired new people. We've really tried to think about the culture, and how do we really accelerate the bits of the culture that we love and maybe leave behind some of the bits that we don't. [And] how we think about technology and AI, which we're very excited about. 

Are there any examples you can give of the bits of the culture that you liked and didn't like, and the things that you've changed? 

Our people were very client-centric. That is a fantastic thing to have in the culture. And they also were very proud of the company, but they were not used to working as one company, as one team. We had conditioned people to operate in their silos, and we had a lot of different businesses, so we had a lot of different silos. We just decided that we didn't want to be that way. Sometimes you can end up in a situation where the team wants to be fragmented, they like their independence. For the most part, that wasn't the case. So we were able to make the case, and people wanted to throw in for the whole journey. Clients sometimes like it that they can shop your store independently. But yet our clients didn't really like that. So the whole thesis of the fact that we want to be able to come together for clients, we want to be organized more efficiently—we had a lot of duplication of things—we used culture and coming together as a group to be able to deal with those issues. We have three strategic pillars: being more for our clients, running our company better, and power our culture. But it's the “culture” one that has created the will to go quicker on the others.

Can you tell me about the thinking behind your rebrand to BNY?

Yeah, so, fun story. This was right when I was right at the beginning during the transition, and I was visiting one of our locations, and I sat with a group of new analysts, and this was not in the United States. And they were like, “By the way, why is the company called BNY Mellon?” And I explained the history, and they say, “Yeah, because I'm telling you, people just don't understand that on a U.K. campus, the name doesn't mean that much and I didn't even know you were a bank,” And it was the Mellon thing. So we started to think about the brand, the logo—we'd had it for 17 years. It was a compromise, at the time of the merger between the Bank of New York and Mellon, that that would be the name—and a name 17 years without a change in logo or brand is quite a long time in this day and age. And so we thought it will probably be smart to rethink that and to think about whether there was a way of smartening it up, making it a little bit more modern, but we very deliberately did not do that at the beginning, because I don't like the whole concept of form over substance. At the end of the day, what really matters is the substance. And if you make substantial progress, and you're actually changing as a company, and you're a different company, then when you rebrand, it just makes sense to people, and that's exactly what we did. It was a year and a half later, and we felt a few months before the time was right. We'd done the work. We tried to do it in a very simple way. And we said, look, we're a modern company. We're evolving to a platforms company. We're not the same thing as we were. Maybe we need to rethink the visuals, but also the brand. And then when we launched it, it was just super well received by people, because then people looked at it and said, “Oh, yes, you aren't that company really anymore. You have evolved.”

There was quite a lot of optimism in your industry about President Trump's second term, and now we're seeing the effects of some of his early policies on the U.S. economy, and talk of a possible recession. How are you thinking about that? Was that optimism unfounded?

Look, there's a lot going on in the world. The world itself is complicated, right? It's not just the United States. We've seen this in France, in Germany, here in the U.K., there are a lot of countries that are grappling with a desire to have a bit of a shift in direction based on the circumstances that they find themselves in. And President Trump was very clear about that during the campaign. He had a different vision for how America needed to change in order to be able to be the best version of itself. And he laid that out pretty clearly, pretty starkly, and that's exactly what he's doing. 

I always reflect back to during the first Trump Administration, particularly outside the U.S., including here in continental Europe, including the U.K., people would sometimes use this phrase of “the signal and the noise,” and they’d get confused exactly about what was going on. And I think the same thing's happening to some extent now, which is, in any process, there's tactics, and then there's strategy. And President Trump's been fairly clear about the strategic things that he's very focused on, but yet it's very easy to get distracted by the tactics. And so when there's a conversation about something that just attracts popular attention it's easy to forget what the plan is under the hood. He has a long range view of things that should change in the United States, and it was always going to require some change, some dislocation, some discomfort, maybe volatility in markets to be able to get there. You cannot do these things without creating some of those byproducts. And so now we're just living [that] reality. 

They're moving quickly, they've got an ambitious agenda, they want to create a lot of change. And so the market struggles to digest all of those things, especially when it's all happening at the same time. 

As the leader of a systemically important institution, how are you navigating the short-term uncertainty?

The first thing about uncertainty is, obviously, we don't wish uncertainty onto the world, but when things are happening in markets, when things are happening in the world, we're able to be helpful to our clients. We're able to, in some cases, explain. I was in D.C. last week and spent time with various members of the Administration. I had the opportunity to hear directly from the President on some of these topics as well. 

Now, when you're in the client coverage business and you're in the business of providing solutions and stability and resiliency and efficiency to clients, it's not a bad thing to have clients want to come talk to you and understand how you can help them and so these types of environments actually can be catalysts for business activity. Having said all of that, you never want too much uncertainty in the world or in markets, but the market was on the high side. It was only three months ago that people were looking at the market and [asking] were the tech companies overvalued? Had the stock market overextended? There was a whole debate around that. Now we've had a correction on those things. I don't think it's reasonable to think about that as the beginnings of a recession. I think it's reasonable to think about that as a correction in markets, because that's kind of what's happened. And it was exactly the sort of correction that people, three months ago, were talking about was probably going to have to happen at some point in 2025. So I think that context is quite important. And if you look at the bond market the long end of the curve has come down in terms of rates, and that's probably a good thing for the U.S. consumer, because mortgage rates are a little cheaper and the cost of borrowing for corporates is a little cheaper. The price of oil has come down a little bit, that's probably kind of a good thing. So there are puts and takes to this whole thing, and what really matters is, how's it going to play out over a slightly longer period of time? There's no question that consumer confidence and CEO confidence in the U.S. has taken a little bit of a dip, because people don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty creates an uncertain environment, and therefore you're less confident. But the facts of the economy have so far been pretty good, and they've been holding in there. So we'll have to see how that evolves, and clearly, there are risks that things could go in different directions. But so far, there's no indication that we're on the precipice of something dire.

Another influence that President Trump has had, since before he even came into office, was around DEI. That's something that we've seen being rolled back across corporate America. It was reported that BNY has been rolling back certain diversity efforts. How are you thinking about DEI and ensuring diversity of thought within the business?

Well, I think you're right. The diversity of thought in a team, diversity of different perspectives, is very important in any group of people. In a business community, you don't want everybody to be an absolute clone of each other. Then you get groupthink, and that's not super helpful. So, we prize being able to have teams who could look at problems from different angles, different perspectives. We're a global firm. We need different global perspectives as well. We have five principles that guide our behavior: we want to be client obsessed, we want to stay curious in terms of how we approach things, we want to spark progress, we want to own it— we want to have an approach, not only to our sense of ownership of the company and the trust that comes with that, but we want to be have an ownership mentality in how we approach our job. And then the fifth one, very important, is we want to thrive together, and we talk about thriving together exactly for the reason that I mentioned earlier on—we were siloed. In the past, we had different corners of the firm. They didn't know each other, people couldn't bridge regions [or] businesses. How can you provide a singular delivery of BNY to a client when you come at it from all these different nooks and crannies? So thriving together means a lot of things to us, but including being one team, solving problems, creating solutions for clients, and doing it together, that is part of what I would now describe as the spirit of the company, and thriving together is a big deal for us.

And so, has there been a change in how you're thinking specifically about DEI?

So we have changed from a siloed, separate mentality to one of coming together as a team. That's the thing that's really changed. And so it's this sense of creating a sense of belonging in the company, where everybody can be here and belong, feel valued, feel that they can contribute to the team, but we've centered ourselves around: if we do all those things well, we will thrive together, and that's what will drive the company forward.

Can you tell me about your OpenAI deal, and what you're thinking about the potential of AI?

We think AI is a very significant development in the world full stop, and in the world of technology, and ultimately, it's our view that companies that don't take AI seriously are at real risk of being left behind. 

We leverage the general intelligence models, but we are building our own agents. We can train agents on different topics, and we have quite a significant number of agents now in production and in use. We very recently onboarded our first digital employee. And the difference between an agent for us and a digital employee is a digital employee has a login ID, they have an email, they have an avatar, they can appear at a Teams call, and they can actually operate using the same interfaces that a human would use to operate, as opposed to an agent, which can't type on a keyboard, and therefore, there are certain systems that don't necessarily have the right interfaces for the AI agent to plug straight in. When you have a login and an email, the [digital employee] can actually report on its activities, can send emails, can follow up, can receive things. And the other thing about a digital employee is it has a human manager who can supervise its activity and direct work to it in the way that you could with a human employee. Now, the interesting thing about the digital employee is they can do things that, frankly, human employees don't love to do, which could be quite mundane and repetitive tasks, but ones that involve research in order to be able to investigate things. And they've got very good audit trails, because you can see everything that they're doing, but you can also see the brain patterns associated with how they thought about the things that they were doing. And so yes, we're excited about AI. We run a multi-agentic framework, and we have multi-agent solutions that are actually now in production. And we think this will be a thing that will be very valuable for us, but also for our clients, because we can solve problems for clients using these situations. And so we're proud to partner with OpenAI. We joined a program, there are others that are in the program and their Frontier program as well. 

Is that going to involve potentially eliminating roles?

I think the way to think about AI, at least for us, is we want AI to be able to be for everyone in the company, because we view it as a real powerful leverage tool for everyone. To give you an example, about 60% of our employees have actually onboarded themselves onto our AI platform and that's a prerequisite to be able to build agents. We have about 5,000 people who have actually experimented with an agent and building an agent themselves, and only half of those are from our engineering team. So we view this as a way of being able to create intelligence leverage for people, and we think that our employees will be excited about being able to do that, because we've got lots of demand for our services. We have finite capacity to do all the things that we want to do, and so if we can create more capacity using AI, we free our people up to go do more things for clients, solve more problems and grow ourselves faster. So, that is actually our biggest focus for AI. We love efficiency, but it's efficiency so that we can go do more things.