Lance Glinn:

Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Emily Portney. She is the global head of asset servicing for BNY. Emily, thanks so much for joining us inside the Ice House. Happy to have you here.

Emily Portney:

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Lance Glinn:

So I want to start at a high level, and asset servicing is critical to markets, but something that I think is often behind the scenes. When you explain just what an asset servicer does to someone outside of the industry, how would you describe the role and why it's so foundational to BNY and the broader financial ecosystem?

Emily Portney:

And you're right, is usually kind of behind the scenes, but frankly, it is so foundational and just critical to the seamless running of the financial ecosystem. And the way I would explain it to a family member is that to the extent you hold a fund, you are a shareholder in a fund, whether it's a mutual fund, a money market fund, an ETF. And asset servicing, and very likely BNY, we are safeguarding the assets of the fund. That's our custody capabilities. We are valuing and striking a nav or a net asset value that you can trade off for that fund. So every day it's reported it has a value. We are often providing all of the investor services. So if you are trying to buy or sell into that fund, we're doing all of that behind the scenes. So it's all of those types of activities.

And of course, we're part of, asset servicing is part of a much broader firm where we do a lot of things that are kind of fundamental to ultimately running the financial services industry.

Lance Glinn:

So would you say when it comes to asset servicing, if an asset servicer, wherever they're doing their job, if they're doing their job right, you don't really hear much about them. They're sort of in the shadows, so to speak. They're not really getting all the headlines.

Emily Portney:

Generally, that's very true. Although lately, what I would say is that I think asset servicing is becoming pretty cool. And some of that is because of all of the trends in the marketplace, and especially around AI and/or digital assets and tokenization. Suddenly a lot of the innovation, even if the innovation might be happening, people think of it at the front end like, oh gee, I want to tokenize an asset. Well, in order to do that, you actually really need to understand how the rails work and how you would settle that asset, how you would trade that asset, how you might use that asset for financing. And so actually it's interesting, but we're at a very interesting moment in time where asset servicing actually is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation that's happening across financial services.

Lance Glinn:

So that seems to me then there's been sort of an evolution, I guess you could say, within asset servicing. And there's been an evolution everywhere. Markets today, they're more global, they're faster, they're more interconnected than ever before. Obviously, I don't have to tell you that. But from your vantage point, how has that sort of interconnectedness, that interconnected nature, how has it just fundamentally changed the nature of asset servicing? How has this evolution changed what asset servicing is?

Emily Portney:

Well, certainly the industry is becoming, it's just much more complex. And what I mean by that is it used to be that our clients, you would have an asset manager that was really a traditional, say, money market or mutual fund manager, or only publics, only invested in public markets. And then you would have a separate player that might be an ETF player. And generally that ETF player in the past would have been very much in the passive and only in the passive space. And then you might've had an alternatives manager. And again, that alternatives manager would have really been a monolith, a credit manager, or maybe a real estate manager. Now, all of those lines are blurring. And so the traditional managers are moving into the more alternative space. Frankly, everyone is moving into the ETF space and not just on a passive basis, but also very much on an active basis and not just equities, but across fixed income and other asset classes as well.

And again, the alternative managers are moving down into kind of the traditional or partnering with many traditional managers. So all of that is kind of coming together. And in some respects, that plays to an organization like ourselves at BNY where we really do have a wide gamut of capabilities across registered funds, inclusive of ETFs and the whole ecosystem around ETFs. And we are also very much one of the largest provider of fund administration services for alternative managers. We're also a global transfer agent in investor solutions. We have middle office outsourcing. So it plays to our strengths, but it does mean that you have to start thinking about your world a bit more horizontally and more as a platforms company. So irrespective of what the ultimate product might be, it's like that you could have the same strategy, for example, that is in a mutual fund wrapper as well as an ETF wrapper.

And nowadays, you can have something that is a more of an alternative that used to be a fund for an LP that is now actually more in an interval fund wrapper and more to a high net worth or a certain retail type of investor.

Lance Glinn:

So I want to pivot the conversation now and I want to talk about alternative investments just for a couple minutes. They've become, I think, a much larger and a much more important part of client portfolios. I'm sure you'd probably agree with that. From an asset servicing perspective, and you talked a little bit about it in an earlier answer, but how has the growth of alternatives really changed the business?

Emily Portney:

Oh, it's much more complex. So thinking alternatives, and especially ... I mean, when we used to talk about alternatives, and this is many, many years ago, we talked about hedge funds, and even hedge funds were mostly kind of like long, short equities, et cetera. Now when we talk about alternatives, it really is about private markets. So it's whether it's private credit, whether it is real estate, whether it is infrastructure, whether it is private equity. And those markets are, first of all, each of those are almost like their own asset class, so they're very different. The accounting engines you need, the valuation tools that you need, just every one of those comes with their own toolkit, their own flavor, and you need domain expertise. So even just to kind of think about just what you now need to support alternative funds, especially if you're supporting alternative funds across each of those different asset classes, you need a lot more broader domain expertise.

Likewise, those markets are just by their nature, they're called private markets because they are not publicly traded. So data, it's just not as transparent. And therefore, especially as one of the largest fund administrators in the world to value those funds, it's not the same as just taking a closing price from the New York Stock Exchange. All of the assets in these funds are ... Each one has to be valued in a certain way, and those valuations are often on a lag, right? So you might be invested in a fund and the actual, the nav is struck 30 days, basically it could be once a quarter. Nowadays, it's probably mostly once a month, but all of those processes are very, very different. In addition to that, as an end investor, an LP, or nowadays as a potentially a high net worth or a retail investor going into a different kind of fund wrapper, and think about it.

And if you happen to invest in any private funds now, just the subscriptions, the redemption process, a capital call, each and every one of those is very different depending upon the fund. And so again, not only are we focused as a large asset servicer on what the GPs who actually are the fund sponsors and launching these funds doing and what they need to value the funds, et cetera, but we are also focused on the end investor experience and what kind of tools they need in order to do a lot of these processes that are either very manual or just very, very bespoke depending upon the fund company and the tools they're using and the processes. So we're focused on investing on both sides.

Lance Glinn:

Away from alternatives a little bit, one thing that you brought up earlier that I do want to discuss is all this conversation around digital assets and tokenization, because those are words that have become a lot more commonplace over the last few months and years and so on and so forth, and have taken on a much bigger role in what the future of finance can sort of look like. So just when looking through your lens, leading obviously BNY's asset servicing, what role do you think these technologies and this tokenization of these digital assets could ultimately play?

Emily Portney:

Oh, I think it feels like at least for digital assets, we've really reached a tipping point. I mean, we have been talking about digital ledger technology for a long time, I mean, quite a while, but it does feel like we've reached a tipping point and now the conversations are very mainstream and the experimentation, if you will, is much, much more mainstream. So we at BNY, for example, have an ability to custody digital assets. We're one of, I think, perhaps the only bank that actually has that capability up and running. We are the reserve custodian for a lot of the stablecoins that have been issued, so that's also a big role and an opportunity for us. We are working with many fund companies to tokenize. Generally, we're tokenizing money market funds first, but we're now also tokenizing ETFs. And so that's very interesting.

All of that is also about mobility, like thinking about the future of settlement, 24/7 settlement. It's thinking about the future of financing. And again, being able to use a tokenized asset to finance a transaction or as collateral for a margin call at any time or 24/7. So I mean, those use cases are real. They're evolving, but they are actually real. Digital assets we also see as important in terms of cross-border payments and other things. Again, things that are naturally kind of painful. It's kind of interesting, but things that still to this day might take days, et cetera, to actually to do.

Likewise, in terms of even distribution, like we talked a little bit about a traditional transfer agent, which is again, a role that most folks don't know that is a big business in asset servicing where we are the go between between the fund and the end investor. If a fund is now tokenized and on a digital ledger, ultimately, again, you suddenly could think about a world where two investors can actually interact with each other on chain versus having to actually go through the transfer agency or agent or a call center and/or an interface to actually buy and sell to one another.

You can think of TA as a new rails for distribution of the funds in a way that we never thought of TA really before. So I think there's a lot of innovation. It does feel like we're at a different point. Having said that, there are trillions of dollars and funds that are on traditional rails-

Lance Glinn:

That have been done the way they've been done for a long time.

Emily Portney:

And they have been done and they will continue to be done that way. And I think where we see BNY as playing an incredibly important role is to be, to some degree, the connector between the traditional rails and the new ecosystem. So while we are building this whole new ecosystem and innovating with not only our clients, but some of the big technology innovators in and around this space, we also are very cognizant that you ultimately need to have a vehicle to connect to the traditional rails, and we do see that as a place where we can be extraordinarily helpful.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. And it's all about that balance, right? It's all about that balance. And one word you brought up in your answer a lot was that word of innovation. And BNY CEO, Robin Vince, outwardly and openly has been very encouraging of innovation within the firm. You look at any of his interviews online or on TV, and he's been very open about constantly innovating and finding ways to evolve the firm and making sure that the firm leads moving forward and doesn't fall behind. What has that encouragement and that push for innovation look like in practice? And how does leadership really create that space for that innovation, for creativity in the implementation of technology?

Emily Portney:

Robin has been a big proponent of innovation. And I think that says a lot about innovation. What we've done and continue to do around AI, I think likewise, certainly speaks to our belief and our ability to continue to innovate, but a lot of that I think is rooted in our culture, our culture as a firm. And we've been around, and I don't know that we even touched on it, but BNY was the first company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Lance Glinn:

And is older than the New York Stock Exchange, as well as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, which as I said, there are not many companies that are older than the NYSA. I think we're going on 200 and I think this May will be 234 years.

Emily Portney:

Yeah, and we're 242.

Lance Glinn:

Exactly. So not many companies that are older than the NYSE, but obviously BNY, one of them. Within asset servicing, because you mentioned AI too a little bit too, how is AI beginning to show up in real, meaningful ways?

Emily Portney:

So AI, we've been on a journey with AI for about the better part of probably a little over three years now. We invested in ... We kind of set up the foundations to really embrace AI for the whole organization to get more comfortable with AI early on. We also built a platform for the firm. It is called ELISA. It is named after Alexander Hamilton, who is our founder, his wife. So it's Eliza. It is basically a model agnostic platform or window into AI. So of course, whether it's Quad or Gemini or ChatGPT, it basically has over 40 different models. That's great because it removes from the employee having to make a decision, what tool should I use? It actually is all available and is trained enough now to know if I'm looking to do this type of research, I probably want to go here. If I'm looking to build this or code this, I probably need to use this model.

By the way, it's available on everybody's desktop. So 2025 was all about adoption. So we really encouraged folks to experiment, use it. It's very easy to build a personal agent. I have a few of my own. We also have a capability now to build an actual digital employee And a digital employee I would think of as many agents grouped together to do a full process. We have about 150 digital employees at the firm. They have IDs. Wow. Okay. They have email accounts. They have access to systems. We onboard them just like we onboard a human being.

Lance Glinn:

Eat lunch with them too?

Emily Portney:

We don't eat lunch together, but they do have a human manager that is looking for model, like how is the model performing, if you will? How's the employee performing? And so those are active. And we now have ... Where we have found the digital employees to be very successful, we use the AI hub to really institutionalize at scale. So for example, data extraction, so an ability to extract data from a document. You can use that for legal agreements. You can do that for KYC. You can do that for subscription and redemptions. You could do that for trade instructions. Again, when there is a use case and we have figured out how to do it really well, that is something that we take and we say, okay, let's institutionalize this. We're leveraging AI for anomaly detection in terms of nav oversight. We're leveraging AI for payment repairs.

So there's lots of different actual applications. And frankly, 2026, at least at BNY, is much more about re-imagining and rewiring the firm. So 2024, foundational, 25 adoption, starting to really think about digital employees and automating and perfecting processes. And now it's about re-imagining, rewiring, rethinking how you did things in the first place.

Lance Glinn:

And so to me, as we look towards 2026, what you just said, rewiring, rethinking, remaking, that all talks to leadership and decision making of what's next. And I want to focus a couple minutes on leadership and leadership aspects because Emily, I'm going to say, your quick takes are pretty famous. Your quick takes, they're pretty famous. One of your colleagues gave me the book that came out and I was reading it over the last couple of days. And it's really interesting because we started as, as I know a weekly email, and correct me if I'm wrong, what started a weekly email. Obviously now the book, as I just said, I was looking through, and I don't mean this disrespectfully, but some of the titles of the quick takes are very random. They're very random.

So I wrote some down. Here's some of the titles so people know what I mean. Learning from NASA, Sunsets, Acronyms My Kids Use. I have a one-year-old daughter, so I'm very excited to see what acronym she uses moving forward. Las Vegas, Beekeeping, write it down. Now, those were just a few of the many quick takes that you have come out with. I know there are about a hundred or so in the book. They all obviously have a meaning. And I was reading through some of them. They all have a meaning. They all connect some way, somehow. But if you can take me back, why'd you start?

Emily Portney:

So when I came into this seat a little over, I guess it's three and a half years ago or so, asset servicing, as I mentioned, happens to be the largest business at BNY. And so including all of our sales folks and our client service folks and our product folks and our ops folks, our tech folks, I found that it was hard. It was hard to ... How do you get to know people or how do you have people feel like they're getting to know you and that they know your leadership style, that you are approachable, that you are a person. And I didn't know what I was getting. I didn't know if they'd be corny. But I think that's the fun of it. Yeah. If they'd be how receptive people would folks would be or how receptive folks would be.

But I started out with, really, it was just a way for people to get to know me. And it was always meant to be very short. I do send it out via email. I still find email, at least for this type of distribution, is The fastest way and the easiest fastest way. It's always a Monday morning. Well, I guess obviously in other parts of the world, it's afternoon or evening, but it's always on a Monday and it's always short. It has to be in this body of the screen because I knew no one wants a whole nother big long email to read. And it's always, most importantly, personal. It is not corporate. And it actually is funny because when I first started doing these, it actually took a while for folks to even get what I ... I had actually asked someone on my team to help, but I think they just were so used to corporate corporate speak.

And the beauty of this is no, it is something that happened over the weekend. It is something that happened last week. It is a blunder I made. It is something I wish I did differently. It's something that my sister said to me that reminded of me of feeling like I was six years old. It was, like you said, a beautiful sunset, a fact that sneakers suddenly are a really big thing and I don't have any cool sneakers. Neither do I. Okay. It's those things. And I have to tell you, it is probably the thing that when I travel, I get in elevators, people will introduce themselves and say, "I love your quick takes or my favorite." They have a favorite one. Someone has said that they shared a quick take where I was obviously very vulnerable with one of their children who was going through a challenging time and said, "Look, other people feel the same thing." Even people who are considered, I suppose, successful.

And so it is a way that has actually ... It has really provided that connectivity to a very broad organization and an authenticity and a vulnerability that I think everyone can relate to. And it actually helps me do my job and it makes me feel like I'm more connected to everyone. And I hope that it makes people feel they're more connected to me.

Lance Glinn:

So based off your answer, I would summarize that as your quick takes takeaway, Emily Portney, global head of asset servicing.

Emily Portney:

Completely.

Lance Glinn:

And they instead insert Emily Portney, mom, sister, friend, person.

Emily Portney:

Absolutely.

Lance Glinn:

Human essentially.

Emily Portney:

Yes. Actually, the last one I did was the last one I did a week ago was about six, seven, and the fact that-

Lance Glinn:

My wife's a third grade teacher, and so she could probably relate to this one because the things and the trends that she tells me that her kids do now ... I think back, I'm 30 years old. I think back to what I was doing when I was in elementary school and middle school, and we had our own quirks, don't get me wrong, but the things that she tells me that her third-graders do now, whether it be the six, seven, whether it be the different TikTok dances, whether it's different trends, it's all over the place.

Emily Portney:

Yeah. Or I did one recently where I'm like, oh my God, Instagram. I've discovered Instagram and I can waste hours on Instagram. Who knew?

Lance Glinn:

Oh my God. Me and you both. Me and you both.

Emily Portney:

Who knew? And so it's just those kind of things I like to share, because again, those make us people, they make us relatable.

Lance Glinn:

Is there one to you? Because you said that there are some that stick out to people. They'll approach you on the elevator and they'll say, Emily, quick take X, Y, and Z was one that really resonated with me. I shared it with my daughter. I shared with my son. I shared with my friend. Is there one? And you've obviously done hundreds at this point. So if there isn't, I understand. But is there one, and I'm sure they essentially all do in some capacity, but one that stands out, one that you remember more than any others or more than not any others, but more than others? I'm putting you on the spot here, putting you on the spot.

Emily Portney:

Yeah, there was one I did, and it did get a lot of feedback. One I did was just about, I think I had just spent the weekend with my sister, and I actually had included a picture of us when we were kids. And I just described how it doesn't matter who you are, but when you spend time with your family, you just go back to whatever role it was you played in the family. And it's just like you still sit at the same spot at the dinner table you might have sat up when you were like 30 years ago or 40 years ago. So I mean, I just shared something like that that was quite funny. So really, it is generally the more personal ones that resonate the most.

Lance Glinn:

One more question. When you send these out, do you go in, let's say a few days before thinking, okay, this is what I'm going to write about? What's your planning process?

Emily Portney:

It's a great question. I have a running inventory because I'll just randomly think of something. I did a whole one about carry on.

Lance Glinn:

Do you have a bunch of notes on your phone? Something pops up in the middle of the day, it's like, "This is going to be a quick take."

Emily Portney:

The one I did recently was carry on because I will go, I am religious about Carryon. I never check. I could literally go on a three-week trip that includes both professional and holiday-

Lance Glinn:

With a carry on.

Emily Portney:

And I go carry on.

Lance Glinn:

Wow.

Emily Portney:

And so I just did a whole thing about carry on.

Lance Glinn:

Got it.

Emily Portney:

So it's just whatever is the flavor, whatever is on my mind, whatever I think. I've also done things where like, gee, I could have handled this situation better. And again, it's all, I think because somehow each one might resonate with someone differently, but overall they seem to connect to people.

Lance Glinn:

So Emily, as we get to the end of our conversation, I do want to look ahead. I want to go back holistically to asset servicing. Obviously BNY, a leader in the asset servicing space, but what will define the leaders moving forward? What will define BNY as it continues to move forward in asset servicing and continues to have it as a leader at the top of the industry?

Emily Portney:

From my perspective, certainly just continuing to evolve and partner with our clients on what is the next product, the next offering, the next innovation that is really important, that ability to evolve and be nimble really is going to be critical even more so given the pace of change in the industry and financial services more broadly. Continuing likewise to be a trusted and scalable player, of course, is really, really important. And thankfully that is something that we are known for.

Likewise, I would say solutioning. So how we take all the very unique assets that BNY has under its umbrella. So whether it is how we can service a fund, how we can actually also distribute a fund, how we can help you with your collateral requirements and needs, how we might be able to also be a sub-advisor to your fund. I mean, there's so many, it's how we are connecting different aspects of the firm as well to really provide more comprehensive solutions to our clients. That's really also resonating and I think is a big part of the success that we have seen at BNY over the last several years.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Emily, I really enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to seeing BNY through the rest of 2026 and beyond. Thank you so much for joining us Inside The Ice House.

Emily Portney:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside The Ice House.

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