The Pershing X platform is set to be rolled out later this year — in Minimum Viable Product (or prototype) form — said Jim Crowley, CEO of BNY Mellon|Pershing, Thursday at the firm's annual Insite conference in Grapevine, Texas.
"We plan to have an MVP out for Pershing X late in 2022, and we're excited about that," he explained during an interview at the event, which was held in-person for the first time since 2019.
Pershing X is the new business unit that the firm announced last year. The aim of the new division is to "design and build innovative solutions for the advisory industry" and also "accelerate Pershing's delivery of consumer grade digital experiences to its clients, as well as the broader marketplace," it said In October.
Pershing X is an "extension" of the Client Experience Reimagined initiative that the firm announced in April 2021. The new division will "incubate, engineer, and deliver a comprehensive, all-in-one set of advisory capabilities" to Pershing's Wealth Solutions clients, including broker-dealers, RIAs and trust companies, it added.
Ainslie Simmonds, who heads Pershing X, has "defined what will be included in that MVP in terms of the elements and the client advisory board that was set up "had a very big meeting here for several hours this week," Crowley said. The firm's tech staff and clients were able to give immediate feedback on the design and it's on schedule, he said.
"I have seen it," Emily Schlosser, the firm's COO, told ThinkAdvisor during the same interview. "Jim has seen it. [But] we are not demonstrating it outside of our organization and a very tight group of client advisors," she said. "It is closed off to anybody externally until we're really ready to have something to share."
Since October, when Pershing X was announced, "we closed on our first acquisition," Crowley pointed out, referring to the purchase of Optimal Asset Management, a direct indexing solutions provider that gives advisors customized indexing solutions for investors seeking tax optimization and personalized portfolios, BNY Mellon | Pershing said in December.
This was also the "first acquisition that we've done in decades at Pershing" overall, he said Thursday.
Since the acquisition closed, "We've been working to sort of bring that onto our network, if you will, from an architecture and functionality standpoint," he noted. "We've since also integrated" Albridge data and reporting solutions and "aggregated, underneath Ainsley, what was formally our managed account operating platform."
In the process, Pershing X went from zero employees to 350, Crowley added.
The firm has positioned Pershing X "as a startup within" BNY Mellon "to really capitalize on that agility that you see in the early days of a startup, but it does have the power of the bank behind it," Schlosser said. (The bank has 50,000 employees, according to Crowley.)
