BNY Mellon's Matthew Cox on Bringing It All Together

When he travels to a new city, he always makes an effort to see something new. It could be anything from stopping by New York’s Meatpacking District to visiting a city’s famous breakfast joint. And making the most of opportunities as they arise is exactly how BNY Mellon’s Matthew Cox ended up in his current role as head of global project support, strategy and risk.

Cox is one of the few industry experts, who has ‘always’ worked in a data-related operations function. He started out focusing on reconciliation of cash and stock at Fidelity, moved up through accounting, and ended up in pricing. This is also the area he continued in when moving to BNY Mellon Asset Servicing six years ago. He has been overseeing European operations, making sure the valuations were accurate, and the group met service-level agreements.

He saw an opportunity for someone to join that group to focus on strategy, but instead of hiring someone new, he was asked to fill the position himself. This summer it was made official, and Cox is now the global strategist in the pricing, corporate actions and data management group, looking for opportunities on a full-time basis. “I need to be thinking about our global data management group, what processes we have on at the moment and ensure the processes are aligned with the global strategy,” he says.

BNY Mellon has project teams for this group in London, New York and Dublin, and Cox is responsible for having an overview of what the different teams are working on. When there is an overlap, he looks at which group could manage the entire project. “The idea of my role was to bring it all together,” he says, explaining that the London team could, for example, have a program to enhance a process to improve efficiency and this may affect global pricing.

To ensure it is, in fact, possible to bring it all together, BNY Mellon last year created a global best-practice steering committee and function groups to help standardize across the areas of pricing, data management and corporate actions. Cox has now been made the chairman of the steering committee, which meets monthly, and the function groups, representing each of the business areas, have weekly meetings and report to Cox.

One example of what the best-practice groups would look at would be corporate actions processing in Europe versus the US. If the processes are different, the group would question why, and if they can be aligned they would decide on a best practice. They would then work with operations to ensure the changes are made. “The committee has helped us align what we’re doing,” says Cox.

In addition, the work has resulted in a list of initiatives the firm wants to roll out. “The goal of all the activities is to take us a step closer to having a global standard for processing,” he says.

An important part of this is to communicate the objective to the rest of the business. Cox is now also an internal spokesperson for the best-practice committee, and is responsible for informing the different business lines about how any changes in best practice can impact their operations. “If we want to change a policy on how we price an asset type, we need to make sure fund accounting is being kept in the loop because it could affect clients and valuations,” he says, adding that the communication part of this initiative is essential.

The communication process internally has also been improved by appointing risk managers in the securities data management group. This has created a point of contact for the compliance group within the business area instead of only relying on a central function. The two “embedded” risk officers, who report to both Cox and the global asset servicing risk group, are responsible for doing mini audits in the data management group, assessing risk related to changing processes, and helping communicate to other areas of the business if any errors occur. “The idea is to have someone fully focused on risk,” says Cox, explaining that the risk manager will get involved if a function is moved from one location to another, for example. “The benefit is that the people who do the assessments have direct experience of what they’re looking at,” he says.

Direct experience is also what helps Cox when formulating the strategic road map for the group. The opportunity now is to ensure everything the group does is taking the business closer to the end goal.