Cathinka Wahlstrom, BNY Chief Commercial Officer, and Jim Crowley, Global Head of BNY Pershing, discuss BNY's unique approach to helping clients grow — from moving at speed to address industry megatrends to co-developing innovative solutions with clients.

Jim Crowley, Global Head of BNY Pershing: The role of Chief Commercial Officer is new for BNY. Can you tell us about the work you do to help us be more for our clients?

Cathinka Wahlstrom, BNY Chief Commercial Officer: The primary role of a Chief Commercial Officer is to drive profitable growth and ensure that we connect dots for our clients — from sales to product development to client service — to create unique experiences for them.

At BNY, it’s about making sure we bring all that our company has to offer to our clients in the most efficient and streamlined way possible.

Questions I consistently ask myself and our teams: How are we showing up in the market? How do we continue to build products that clients need today and well into the future? And most important, how do we consistently work in close collaboration with our clients to best meet their needs?

BNY Pershing is a great example of this. Since I joined BNY, I’ve seen teams across Pershing work together to connect dots with colleagues across the company to bring more holistic solutions to our clients — as one BNY.

Jim: We have benefited from a rich legacy handed to us by our predecessors: a collection of strong businesses and a strong client franchise. For us, resiliency is commercial. It’s in our company DNA. You don’t get to be in business for 240 years without consistently thinking differently and innovating for clients, whether it relates to their business, their advisors’ business or the individual investors those advisors serve. We pull ideas from the market to innovate, reinvent and reimagine how things get done. Where do you see the biggest opportunities?

Cathinka: It is a competitive market, and new products, solutions and partnerships are evolving faster than ever. Most of our clients are in growth mode and they want us to help them grow and scale.

The thing we're hearing loud and clear from them: the need for efficiency. They might no longer have time to build solutions themselves, so they want to look at what we have to offer to help them scale — and we invite clients to co-create solutions with us too.

For example, and you know this better than anyone, that Wove, our innovative and intuitive wealth advisory platform, wasn’t invented by just sitting in our own conference room, contemplating market needs. Instead, we truly built Wove together with our clients, which speaks to how we are seen as a trusted collaborator.

Jim: As I spend time with clients every week, I hear the same themes: How do we scale our business? How can we be more efficient and eliminate bottlenecks? How can we enhance productivity for our teams?

These questions are at the core of what we are trying to do with Wove. Advisors spend way too much time doing administrative tasks with disconnected technology and not enough time talking to clients and prospects. Wove offers a product set that includes an advisory platform, a data portal, an investor portal and connectivity with other applications, including our clients’ own tech stacks.

To help put this into perspective, we recently worked with a long-standing client to create a solution set that brought together clearing and custody and Wove to upgrade their advisor experience. Whether they're serving an emerging young investor or someone in the high-net-worth category, we were able to offer an integrated solution to help solve this client's challenge. That’s an inspiring growth story because our clients must be successful first for us to be successful.  

Cathinka: That’s a perfect segue to what I am most excited about for this year, as there is so much more we can do to support our clients, especially when it comes to helping them address key industry megatrends so they can gain a competitive edge.

There are several that are top of mind for our clients, including continued growth in the U.S. wealth market, an ongoing shift toward private credit and alternative investments, and the growing demand for managed accounts and new investment vehicles, including active ETFs and SMAs.

Our platforms operating model enables us to support clients as a comprehensive products, solutions and services provider. This means we can help clients with everything from becoming more operationally efficient to expanding into new markets to exploring new client segments — all of which can help them compete and succeed.

At BNY, we have the foundation and the building blocks to enable clients to tackle these challenges — at speed.

We recently conducted a client satisfaction survey and there was one overarching sentiment that resonated for me: “BNY feels very energized.” What I can say is that we are just beginning to unlock the opportunity for our clients.

To learn more about BNY’s solutions click here.