Via logodix.com
The oldest bank in America is skipping the AI vanity metrics game and pouring $3.8 billion into technology that bridges traditional finance with digital assets.
While Silicon Valley engineers compete on leaderboards to burn the most AI tokens, the oldest bank in the United States is taking a decidedly different approach. BNY Mellon’s CFO Dermot McDonogh says the firm doesn’t waste time tracking how many AI prompts its employees fire off, calling token costs “modest within modest” relative to broader engineering spend.
The anti-tokenmaxxing playbook #
Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn reported that some big tech companies turned token consumption into a status symbol, with engineers urged to climb usage leaderboards. McDonogh told Fortune’s newsletter that this framing “never took hold” inside BNY. The firm is more interested in what AI actually produces for the business than in how many tokens it burns getting there.
The bank spent $3.8 billion on technology in 2025, representing 19% of its total revenue. Despite modest workforce reductions, the bank is focused on revenue growth and boosting per-employee performance.
The digital asset custody play #
The bank launched its US digital asset custody platform back in October 2022, supporting Bitcoin and Ether for select institutional clients, making BNY one of the first major US custodian banks to hold crypto directly.
BNY plans to introduce its Digital Asset Data Insights platform in April 2025, with BlackRock’s tokenized fund signed on as the first client. BNY is also set to introduce Bitcoin and Ether custody services in the UAE in 2026 through strategic partnerships.
Why this matters for crypto investors #
The custodian layer is arguably the most critical piece of institutional crypto adoption. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and large asset managers don’t buy Bitcoin through Coinbase. They need regulated custody from counterparties their compliance teams already trust.
Tokenized funds — where traditional assets like Treasuries or money market funds are represented on-chain — have been one of the fastest-growing segments of institutional crypto activity. BNY providing the data infrastructure layer beneath BlackRock’s tokenized fund suggests the bank sees tokenization as more than a buzzword.
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