BNY Mellon Expands Crypto Custody and AI Strategy

BNY Mellon, the custodian that oversees nearly $50 trillion in assets for its clients, has been steadily deepening its digital asset infrastructure across two parallel tracks: expanding institutional crypto custody and deploying on-premise AI compute at a scale no other global bank has matched. Fortune's July 28, 2026 profile of the bank highlighted how leadership frames AI investment around measurable business outcomes rather than model-centric benchmarks — a posture that mirrors the bank's methodical approach to digital assets more broadly. The custody build has been years in the making. BNY formed an enterprise Digital Assets Unit in 2021, and in October 2022 it became the first major U.S. bank to go live with a digital asset custody platform, initially enabling select clients to hold and transfer Bitcoin and Ether. That platform has since grown in scope. BNY subsequently integrated Circle's USDC into the platform — enabling custody, issuance, and redemption so clients can hold and convert USD to USDC within BNY wallets — the first stablecoin integrated by a major U.S. custodian, according to CryptoRank. BNY has also stated it plans to extend support to additional stablecoin issuers and digital cash services in subsequent phases. The bank's Treasury Services division processes approximately $2.5 trillion in daily payments and holds approximately $55.8 trillion in assets under custody and administration, according to PANews. That operational scale gives BNY's digital asset custody offering a distribution advantage that newer entrants cannot replicate quickly. A BNY-commissioned survey conducted at the time of the platform's launch found that 91% of institutional investors expressed interest in investing in tokenized products, and that 41% already held cryptocurrency in their portfolios, with a further 15% planning to do so within two to five years. The survey's sample composition and methodology were not disclosed in the press release. On the AI side, BNY has become the first major bank to deploy an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX H100 systems, according to the Nvidia blog case study on BNY's deployment. The bank's AI Hub already has more than 20 AI-enabled solutions in production, and a firmwide exercise identified more than 600 potential AI applications, with dozens already in development. Fortune's reporting noted that BNY leadership evaluates these initiatives against concrete business outcomes — cost reduction, processing speed, error rates — rather than token-generation metrics or model benchmarks. That framing is consistent with how the bank has described its digital asset work: incremental, client-driven, and anchored to existing custody and settlement infrastructure.

The custody expansion has not been confined to the United States. BNY launched 24/7 U.S. dollar book transfers in June 2026, opening weekend and holiday access to USD movements inside the bank's ledgers. Separately, Tradeweb executed a real-time on-chain Treasury trade on the Canton Network, settling against tokenized cash with participants including Franklin Templeton and Virtu, in a transaction where BNY participated as settlement infrastructure. BNY has also disclosed plans for tokenized-Treasury pilots by end-2026 and a 24/7 settlement offering targeting 2027, according to Crypto Daily's reporting on BNY's settlement roadmap. The specific client mandates, asset classes, and blockchain networks for those pilots have not been named publicly.

Citigroup announced plans to launch institutional-grade crypto custody services in 2026, according to PANews, making it the most prominent institution to follow BNY's path. The competitive context matters for fund managers and compliance officers evaluating custodian selection: BNY's four-year head start in live custody operations, combined with its payment processing volume, gives it a documented operational track record that prospective competitors have not yet established.

BNY's institutional survey data also carries a caveat worth noting for compliance-oriented readers. The figures — 91% tokenization interest, 41% current crypto holders — were drawn from a survey sponsored by BNY itself, published alongside the October 2022 platform launch announcement. The survey's sample size, respondent universe, and methodology were not specified in BNY's official digital asset custody press release, limiting the weight those figures can carry as independent market measurements.

What the available disclosures establish concretely is this: BNY operates a live, multi-asset digital custody platform with stablecoin integration, 24/7 dollar transfer capability, and the financial sector's most powerful on-premise AI compute deployment. What they do not establish is the number of institutional clients actively using the crypto custody platform, the volume of digital assets held in custody, the fee structure applied to tokenized-asset mandates, or the specific technical architecture — chain, smart-contract standard, or settlement agent — that will underpin the tokenized-Treasury pilots announced for later this year. The Fortune reporting on AI outcome metrics also did not disclose which of the 600-plus identified AI opportunities are linked directly to the digital asset or RWA custody business lines.

BNY Mellon Grows Crypto Custody and AI Strategy

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