NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — BNY Mellon, a global leader in investment management and investment services, announced that it has established an innovation center in California’s Silicon Valley. The opening of the facility is part of the company’s plans to use emerging and disruptive technologies such as Cloud Computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things to gain new business insights, develop inventive, operational and technological capabilities, and identify potential new ventures that anticipate and cater to emerging client needs.
“BNY Mellon is committed to becoming the financial industry’s technology leader,” said Suresh Kumar, senior executive vice president and chief information officer. “There is no better place in the world to do this than in Silicon Valley, one of the greatest centers of technology and innovation. By tapping into the area’s top tech talent and giving them a space specially-designed for innovation, BNY Mellon will be primed to embrace emerging technology that enables us to better run our businesses and serve our clients.”
Michael Gardner, managing director and head of the company’s Silicon Valley facility, most recently was with Apigee, Inc, where he led research and development, support, security and cloud operations. Previously, he held executive-level engineering posts at various startups and public companies in that region, including LiveOps and eBay.
Gardner will lead BNY Mellon’s efforts to foster collaborative innovation that leverages advanced and prototype technology to develop new offerings, improve customer service and reduce time-to-market. The types of technologies the center will focus on include, but are not limited to, mobile development, cloud computing, application development, information security, decision science/analytics and collaboration technology.
“BNY Mellon already is known for being a foremost provider of technology solutions and infrastructure for the world’s capital markets,” Gardner said. “Through our connection to this community of open collaboration, we can further our promise of technological excellence by bringing new technologies with practical and proven business uses to market more quickly.”
“Mike’s rich background in development, strategic thinking and successful execution will bring new vision and perspective to foresee and nurture innovative breakthroughs to BNY Mellon,” Kumar added.
The Silicon Valley site is BNY Mellon’s fourth global innovation center with a mission to encourage collaborative, break-through thinking that will leverage talent development and lead to innovations for clients. The company already operates similar centers in Jersey City, New Jersey; and Pune and Chennai in India, where employees share ideas that encourage dialogue, creativity and collaboration with staff anywhere in the world.
In addition to the innovation centers, BNY Mellon also provides numerous opportunities for its global employees to offer innovative ideas to enhance businesses or increase revenues. For example, the company’s A.C.E. (Accelerate, Collaborate and Execute) Awards give employees the opportunity to compete for cash awards, an opportunity to work full-time in an incubator on the start-up of the winning idea and – if implemented – share up to 10 percent of the value the winning idea creates. Also, the company offers an Innovation Boot Camp, which is a unique training program offered in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, designed to help participants generate stronger innovative ideas, evaluate innovative ideas for business impact, use business cases to gain greater support for ideas and develop implementation plans to advance ideas.