BNY Mellon Shakes Up Treasury Unit for Blockchain Focus

BNY Mellon’s treasury unit has organized a new innovation group aimed at investigating and testing new technologies like blockchain.

Dubbed the Global Innovation Group, the effort will be spearheaded by managing director Christopher Mager, who previously worked as the unit’s head of market segments.

Officials from the bank said that the new effort is, at its core, aimed at helping the bank and its clients navigate an environment that is being reshaped by new technologies like blockchain.

Treasury Services CEO Ian Stewart said in a statement:

"The Global Innovation Group was created to help us meet the challenges of this period of transformation."

The BNY Mellon Treasury Services Business has perhaps come to be a major focal point for blockchain investigation at the Jersey City-based bank, given the tech’s applicability in the areas of payments and transaction settlement.

BNY held a wide-ranging seminar on the tech in January that explored blockchain's challenges and opportunities.

Executives with the unit expressed optimism about the tech at the time, and later put its research into action by building a prototype for creating a back-up record of transactions on a distributed ledger.

BNY Mellon image via David Fulmer / Flickr (cropped image used under creative commons licence).