BNY
The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, commonly known as BNY or by its prior brand name BNY Mellon, is an American international financial services company headquartered in New York City. It was established in its current form in July 2007 by the merger of the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation. Through the lineage of Bank of New York, which was founded in 1784 by a group that included Alexander Hamilton, BNY is regarded as one of the three oldest banks in the United States and among the oldest in the world. It was the first company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2024, it was ranked 130th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue, and a 2018 Fortune analysis identified it as the oldest company on the list. As of 2024, it was the 13th-largest bank in the United States by total assets and the 83rd-largest in the world. BNY is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.
BNY provides a wide range of financial services, including asset management, custody and securities services, government finance services, and pension plan management. The company serves diverse clients, including corporations, institutions, and individuals, offering financial expertise and technological platforms to support their objectives. The company's key subsidiaries include BNY Investments, BNY Pershing, and BNY Wealth. It is the world's largest custodian bank and securities services company. As of September 2024, BNY had $2.1trillion in assets under management and $52.1trillion in assets under custody and administration, making it the first bank to surpass $50trillion. BNY has been named among Fortunes World's Most Admired Companies.
History
Bank of New York
The first bank in the U.S. was the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, which was chartered by the Continental Congress in 1781; Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were among its founding shareholders. In February 1784, The Massachusetts Bank in Boston was chartered.The shipping industry in New York City chafed under the lack of a bank, and investors envied the 14% dividends that Bank of North America paid, and months of local discussion culminated in a June 1784 meeting at a coffee house on St. George's Square which led to the formation of the Bank of New York company. The bank operated without a charter for seven years. The initial plan was to capitalize the company with $750,000, a third in cash and the rest in mortgages, but after this was disputed the first offering was to capitalize it with $500,000 in gold or silver. When the bank opened on June 9, 1784, the full $500,000 had not been raised; 723 shares had been sold, held by 192 people. Aaron Burr had three of them, and Hamilton had one and a half shares. The first president was Alexander McDougall and the Cashier was William Seton.
Its first offices were in the old Walton Mansion in New York City. In 1787, it moved to a site on Hanover Square that the New York Cotton Exchange later moved into.
The bank provided the United States government its first loan in 1789. The loan was orchestrated by Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, and it paid the salaries of United States Congress members and President George Washington.
The Bank of New York was the first company to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange when it first opened in 1792. In 1796, the bank moved to a location at the corner of Wall Street and William Street, which would later become 48 Wall Street.
The bank had a monopoly on banking services in the city until the Bank of the Manhattan Company was founded by Aaron Burr in 1799; the Bank of New York and Hamilton vigorously opposed its founding.
During the 19th century, the bank was known for its conservative lending practices that allowed it to weather financial crises. It was involved in the funding of the Morris and Erie canals, and steamboat companies. The bank helped finance both the War of 1812 and the Union Army during the American Civil War. Following the Civil War, the bank loaned money to many major infrastructure projects, including utilities, railroads, and the New York City Subway.
Through the early 20th century, the Bank of New York continued to expand and prosper. In July 1922, the bank merged with the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company. The bank continued to profit and pay dividends throughout the Great Depression, and its total deposits increased during the decade. In 1948, the bank again merged, this time with the Fifth Avenue Bank, which was followed by a merger in 1966 with the Empire Trust Company. The bank's holding company was created in 1969.
Image:Bank of new york.png|140px|thumb|Older Bank of New York logo
In 1988, the Bank of New York merged with Irving Bank Corporation after a year-long takeover bid by Bank of New York. Irving had been headquartered at 1 Wall Street and after the merger, this became the headquarters of the Bank of New York on July 20, 1988.
From 1993 to 1998, the bank made 33 acquisitions, including acquiring JP Morgan's Global Custody Business in 1995. Ivy Asset Management was acquired in 2000.
In the 1990s, or "Mickey" Galitzine established and headed the Eastern European Department at the Bank of New York until 1992 and hired many Russians. He mentored many new bankers in Hungary, the former East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria and travelled extensively to capital cities in the former Soviet Union or the CIS to assist new bankers especially in Russia to where he travelled for his first time in 1990, Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Bank of New York had correspondent accounts for several Russian banks including Inkombank, Menatep, Tokobank, Tveruniversalbank, Alfa-Bank, , Moscow International Bank and others.
In October 2002, Bank of New York entered into an alliance with ING to gain a stronger footing in Eastern European markets.
In 2003, Bank of New York acquired Pershing LLC, the stock clearing unit of Credit Suisse First Boston for $2 billion. The Pershing acquisition made BNY the nation’s largest clearing firm for stock trades. EMAT and the wealth management firm Lockwood Financial Partners, which was originally formed as Lockwood Advisors in 1995 and was based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, specialised in providing independent financial investment advisory services to brokers of high-net-worth individuals; it went on to become one of the largest independent advisory companies in the United States before both firms were sold to the Bank of New York in 2002, while Gerald L Hassell was president of Bank of New York. Lockwood and Pershing LLC were folded into the BNY Securities Group under the Pershing umbrella in October 2003, with Joseph M. Velli heading the BNY Securities Group. It allowed Bank of New York to compete against U.S. Trust, J.P. Morgan Chase, as well as those more brokerage-oriented organizations for private banking clients.
In 2005, the bank paid a $14 million settlement to the Russian government concerning the money laundering activities of a rogue employee in the 1990s. This scandal has sometimes been called Russiagate.
In 2006, the Bank of New York traded its retail banking and regional middle-market businesses for J.P. Morgan Chase's corporate trust assets. The deal signaled the bank's exit from retail banking.
Mellon Financial
Mellon Financial was founded as T. Mellon & Sons' Bank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1869 by retired judge Thomas Mellon and his sons Andrew W. Mellon and Richard B. Mellon. The bank invested in and helped found numerous industrial firms in the late 1800s and early 1900s including Alcoa, Westinghouse, Gulf Oil, General Motors and Bethlehem Steel. Both Gulf Oil and Alcoa are, according to the financial media, considered to be T. Mellon & Sons' most successful financial investments.In 1902, T. Mellon & Sons' name was changed to the Mellon National Bank. In 1946, the firm merged with the Union Trust Company, a business founded by Andrew Mellon in 1899, and other affiliated financial firms. The newly formed organization was named the Mellon National Bank and Trust Company, and was Pittsburgh's first US$1 billion bank.
The bank formed the first dedicated family office in the United States in 1971. A reorganization in 1972 led to the bank's name changing to Mellon Bank, N.A. and the formation of a holding company, Mellon National Corporation.
Mellon Bank acquired multiple banks and financial institutions in Pennsylvania during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992, Mellon acquired 54 branch offices of Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, the first savings bank in the United States, founded in 1819.
In 1993, Mellon acquired The Boston Company from American Express and AFCO Credit Corporation from The Continental Corporation. The following year, Mellon merged with the Dreyfus Corporation, bringing its mutual funds under its umbrella. In 1999, Mellon Bank Corporation became Mellon Financial Corporation. Two years later, it exited the retail banking business by selling its assets and retail bank branches to Citizens Financial Group.
Merger
On December 4, 2006, the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation announced they would merge. The merger created the world's largest securities servicing company and one of the largest asset management firms by combining Mellon's wealth-management business and the Bank of New York's asset-servicing and short-term-lending specialties. The companies anticipated saving about $700 million in costs and cutting around 3,900 jobs, mostly by attrition.The deal was valued at $16.5 billion and under its terms, the Bank of New York's shareholders received 0.9434 shares in the new company for each share of the Bank of New York that they owned, while Mellon Financial shareholders received 1 share in the new company for each Mellon share they owned. The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial entered into mutual stock option agreements for 19.9 percent of the issuer's outstanding common stock. The merger was finalized on July 1, 2007. The company's principal office of business was located at the One Wall Street office previously held by the Bank of New York. The full name of the company became The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., with the BNY Mellon brand name being used for most lines of business.