Who Owns Pershing?

Pershing and Company was founded in New York in 1939, taking its name from the street address of its first office near Pershing Square. For most of its history the firm built the unglamorous but essential business of correspondent clearing: executing and settling trades, holding client assets, and handling back-office work for broker-dealers that did not want to run those functions themselves.

Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette acquired Pershing in the 1970s and ran it as the backbone of DLJ's clearing operations. When Credit Suisse First Boston bought DLJ in 2000, Pershing moved under the Swiss bank's control. Mellon Financial purchased Pershing from CSFB in 2003 for approximately $2 billion, pairing it with Mellon's custody and fund services to create a clearing powerhouse that handled trades for some of the largest broker-dealers in the business.

The DLJ years mattered because they turned Pershing from a back-office utility into a brand with a reputation among financial intermediaries. Correspondent clearing was already consolidating, and DLJ's institutional relationships gave Pershing a client base that a standalone clearer would have struggled to assemble.

The 2007 merger of Mellon Financial and Bank of New York folded Pershing into the new Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, where it became one of the world's largest clearing and custody providers for broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, and wealth managers. Under the 2024 BNY rebrand, the firm's technology offerings were regrouped under the Pershing X name while the regulated entity remains Pershing LLC.

As of 2026 Pershing clears for thousands of introducing firms and advisory practices, holding trillions in client assets under custody within BNY's $59.3 trillion consolidated footprint. The 2024 Pershing X launch consolidated the unit's technology offerings under a separate marketing name, aiming the platform at the RIA segment where clearing and adviser tools compete most directly with Schwab and Fidelity.