The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation

What does BNY own?

BNY owns the Pershing clearing business, the BNY Investments boutique group including Newton and Insight Investment, BNY Wealth, and a 50% stake in the CIBC Mellon joint venture. Its $59.3 trillion custody book holds clients' assets but is not owned by BNY.

Is BNY publicly traded?

Yes. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BK. Bank of New York was the first company listed on the NYSE in 1792.

Who founded BNY?

Alexander Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784. The Mellon lineage traces to Thomas Mellon, who founded a Pittsburgh bank in 1869. The two institutions merged in 2007.

Where is BNY headquartered?

BNY is headquartered in New York, New York, USA, at 240 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan.

How many brands does BNY own?

BNY operates a small set of client-facing brands: the BNY master brand, Pershing, BNY Investments and its specialist boutiques, BNY Wealth, and the CIBC Mellon joint venture in Canada.

Who owns BNY?

BNY is publicly owned with no controlling shareholder. Institutional investors including Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street hold the largest stakes.

How large is BNY?

For FY2025, BNY reported record revenue of $20.1 billion, record net income of $5.3 billion, $59.3 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration, $2.2 trillion in assets under management, and approximately 52,000 employees.

Alexander Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784, five years before George Washington took the oath of office, and the bank opened in the Walton Mansion in June of that year. In 1792 it became the first company whose shares traded on what would become the New York Stock Exchange. The bank financed early federal government operations and remained a conservative commercial bank through the nineteenth century.

The Mellon half of the company traces to 1869, when retired judge Thomas Mellon founded T. Mellon and Sons' Bank in Pittsburgh. His sons Andrew Mellon and Richard Mellon turned it into one of the great American banking fortunes, financing Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Westinghouse, Carborundum, and Koppers. Andrew Mellon served as Treasury Secretary under three presidents. Mellon Financial grew into a diversified financial company, acquiring the Dreyfus fund family in 1994 for approximately $1.8 billion and the Pershing clearing business from Credit Suisse First Boston in 2003 for roughly $2 billion.

In December 2006 the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial announced a merger of equals, completed in July 2007 in a stock swap valued at approximately $16.5 billion. The deal paired Bank of New York's custody and clearing businesses, including the government securities franchise, with Mellon's asset management and wealth businesses. The combined Bank of New York Mellon became the world's largest custodian almost immediately.

The financial crisis tested that position less severely than it did money-center banks, though the company accepted $3 billion in TARP funds, which it repaid in 2009. Its custody-heavy model proved resilient precisely because it had no consumer lending book to write down. In 2015 it sold its historic 1 Wall Street headquarters tower and consolidated at 240 Greenwich Street.

In June 2024 the company executed a major rebrand, retiring "BNY Mellon" as its public-facing identity in favor of BNY and reorganizing client-facing units under names such as BNY Investments, BNY Wealth, and Pershing X. The legal name remains The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation. Under Robin Vince, who became CEO in 2022 and Chairman in 2023, the company delivered record FY2025 revenue of $20.1 billion, record net income of $5.3 billion, and a 26% return on tangible common equity.

BNY's largest historical regulatory matter was the foreign exchange scandal that surfaced in 2011, when regulators alleged the bank overcharged custody clients on "standing instruction" FX trades. In 2015 the company paid approximately $714 million to resolve parallel actions by the Department of Justice, the New York Attorney General, and the SEC, without admitting wrongdoing, and exited the standing-instruction FX business model.

Also in 2015, the SEC fined BNY $14.8 million for FCPA violations after the bank provided internships to relatives of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund officials, one of the early internship-quid-pro-quo cases in banking. In 2018 BNY paid more than $54 million to resolve SEC charges over improper handling of American depositary receipt pre-release practices.

No comparably sized enforcement action has emerged since. As a systemically important custodian, BNY operates under continuous supervision by the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and dozens of foreign regulators.