AFTAs 2025: Best data management initiative—BNY

Overview

LiquidityDirect offers institutional clients access to over 340 short-term instruments through a single, automated platform. Integrated with BNY’s custody framework, it standardizes and consolidates data across treasury, investment and payment functions. With analytics, ESG insights, tokenized money market funds (MMFs) and multibank sweeps, it improves data quality, automates workflows and reduces costs while ensuring updated accessibility. Advanced control features provide users with the ability to manage all their trading and compliance rules.

Problems it solves  

Prior to this initiative, financial institutions faced fragmented systems, manual cash instruction setups and siloed collateral and treasury operations. This made it difficult for them to efficiently manage liquidity, investments and collateral, while maintaining visibility and compliance under regulatory pressures such as Basel III and money market fund legislation.

How the tech works  

LiquidityDirect digitizes and standardizes cash instructions, money market fund selections and data flows across treasury, liquidity and collateral operations. It integrates multiple treasury management systems, automates fund sweeps, supports real-time digital asset transactions, and provides advanced analytics, enabling a single, consolidated view of short-term assets while ensuring compliance and operational efficiency.

Initiative roadmap

LiquidityDirect aims to extend integration across treasury ecosystems and management platforms, enabling seamless connectivity and end-to-end workflow automation. Planned enhancements include broader global adoption of tokenized instruments, expanded short-term investment options, and ongoing digitization of liquidity, treasury, and collateral processes, delivering a consolidated, efficient and compliant enterprise-wide data management platform.

Why they won

BNY’s LiquidityDirect platform/initiative wins this category in the American Financial Technology Awards thanks to its ability to create a unified and automated foundation for managing liquidity, short-term investments and collateral at scale. The platform is designed to replace fragmented processes with standardized data, integrated cash instructions and connectivity across a range of traditional back-office business processes including treasury and custody functions. 

The benefits to end-users are that they are able to generate reliable, consolidated views of their assets, allowing for faster and more accurate investment decisions, stronger compliance oversight and all-around improved control. Features within LiquidityDirect such as tokenized money market funds, multibank sweeps and sophisticated analytics expand users’ access to a range of diverse instruments, while simultaneously reducing their operational burden. Ultimately, LiquidityDirect improves data quality and automates key workflows and by so doing, supports a more resilient liquidity management framework.

BNY also won the best analytics initiative category in this year’s American Financial Technology Awards.