At Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Finextra spoke to BNY executive platform owner of payments platform Isabel Schmidt, and executive platform owner for treasury services Carl Slabicki, on everything AI, blockchain, and cross-border.
Schmidt said that BNY revolutionised its operations through its ongoing platform operating model transformation. Employees part of Schmidt’s organisation are split across teams into groups of 10 to solve specific problems in two-week sprints, intended to deliver outcomes within the fortnight. Schmidt highlighted that the new working model was an adjustment for employees, but they are pleased with the progress of dividing up work and bringing together employees from various teams to collaborate and build solutions incrementally. The process is part of BNY’s global transformation journey to move away from rail-driven requirements and to focus on delivering outcomes for their clients.
“The way we define outcomes and key results is not so much in operational efficiency, but what we can do for the client. How much faster can I process a payment? How many fewer payments go to repair? How much faster can I respond?” Schmidt explained.
She added: “That is really what we want to measure, not so much on what the cost reduction is. It is really about improving service quality.”
Schmidt continued that AI has been implemented widely across the bank, almost 100% of BNY employees are AI-trained, and BNY’s AI platform Eliza had over 110 AI solutions in production by the end of September. However, Schmidt emphasised that human intervention is still essential to prevent AI bias, and that any checks taking place always involve human touch and are never 100% AI validated.
Speaking excitedly about the future, Schmidt commented that she “cannot even begin to imagine what we can do even six months from now” on nurturing creativity among their staff, and seeing what new developments will emerge from AI integration.
New collaborations for cross-border solutions
BNY has collaborated with Sparkassen, a network of German savings banks, to launch a payment solution called Crossmo, supplying users with an instant cross-border payments experience. The collaboration will lower the savings banks’ fees by up to 75% in some cases, hoping to increase competitiveness against new entrants.
Slabicki explained that users “can use Crossmo for cross-border FX and money movement, and we're helping enable that through integrating our APIs into the experience. It’s a really cool experience of combining open banking, embedded finance, real-time FX, and real-time cross-border money movement – using what is here and tangible today, our correspondent network, and direct clearing APIs – to form a resilient infrastructure.”
Slabicki highlighted that the next priorities for BNY would be to connect the global economy and enable smooth, frictionless payments for their clients. He stated that BNY already enables RTP and FedNow instant payments in the US, and is expanding instant payment capabilities in the EU, Australia, India, Thailand, and the UK for 24/7 instant settlements.
Slabicki emphasised how ISO will combat fragmentation in cross-border payments: “I am still a firm believer that ISO is a fundamental element of the journey that we’re on collectively as an industry to make payments better. If we all talk different languages, nothing is ever going to be fast.”
Stablecoins and tokenisation will be major trends
Touching on key trends in the industry, Schmidt mentioned digitised assets, tokenised deposits, and stablecoins – highlighting that risks need to be managed to prevent fragmentation of the industry, especially for banks that serve customers globally.
Slabicki stated that innovations in digital assets will change the market infrastructure in financial services to be accessible everyday, at all hours of the day, where traditional services are still only able to provide a Monday to Friday offering. These services can be used for lending, credit, investing, and can be transferred across currencies in a quick, efficient way.
“Creative technology like blockchain and the tokenisation of different assets, enabling their use 24/7 to match with payments, brings the whole financial life cycle in line with the payments experience,” said Slabicki.
He added: “If you think about all the banks across the globe, if everyone is building their own tokens, you have different stablecoins kind of popping up across the different markets. The technology may be fantastic, but if you're not able to interoperate them or use it to go bank-to-bank or corridor-to-corridor, there's no value. You need network effect, and you need the technology for it to really create value for the market. You do need both.”