BNY Mellon, JP Morgan Increase Digital Asset Hiring – Ledger Insights

BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are both accelerating the adoption of digital assets. Each has more than a dozen vacancies specific to digital assets or blockchain. BNY Mellon is developing digital cash, and JP Morgan appears to be looking at acquisitions.

BNY Mellon, digital assets and digital cash

BNY Mellon is the world’s largest global custodian bank, with $44 trillion in assets under custody. There are approximately 18 positions primarily related to digital assets, with dozens more that mention digital assets in the job description.

Two points of interest are the strategy and the mention of digital cash.

In terms of strategy, one of the BNY Mellon job postings states: “Our digital asset strategy focuses on expanding our core products to support this new asset class, building entirely new businesses and leveraging DLT as a capability to transform our services and modernize our infrastructure.”

The most notable vacancy is the role of ‘Digital Cash Product Architect’.

We have asked BNY Mellon to elaborate on the nature of the digital cash, but they declined to comment. When you step back, consider that the bank provides institutional custody for crypto. If it wants to help settle crypto transactions, on-chain cash will be useful.

Speculating on how BNY Mellon digital cash might work, it could involve private tokenized money exchanging with a public stablecoin at the point of settlement. It is also conceivable that the bank could provide deposit tokens on a public blockchain in line with what JP Morgan has discussed. But from a regulatory perspective, the latter currently lacks regulatory clarity.

The digital cash job description includes being a subject matter expert in:

• Regulatory implications for product design
• DLT through a lens of commercial and strategic applicability to the product / LOB (industry), and technical expertise on development trends
• Integration with broader enterprise tokenization strategy.

The person will also develop “client and industry facing thought leadership on DLT and development of new technologies (eg parachains, bridges, etc).”

Meanwhile, BNY Mellon appointed Caroline Butler as CEO of its Digital Assets unit earlier this month.

JP Morgan eyeing acquisitions?

As for JP Morgan, it has around 15 open positions in its Onyx blockchain division in India, Greece and New York.

Apart from 15 direct Onyx positions, a handful of roles within JP Morgan payments are linked to Onyx. A position in the payments division involves strategic investments and M&A integration. Part of the role covers “the broader strategic agenda for JP Morgan Payments, including priority initiatives related to Onyx / Liink / JPM Coin, APIs / Open Banking, integrated industry solutions (eg for marketplaces) and many more.” This could mean that acquisitions are on the radar for Onyx.

Another of the roles reveals that Onyx Digital Asset’s blockchain network has processed $550 billion in transactions since its inception. This will include the repo network. (Broadridge’s DLT repo is somewhat different, but it earns $1 trillion a month).

And the job advertisements make it clear that there are four pillars in Onyx’s work:

• Liink by JP Morgan, a blockchain network of banks that facilitates payments and the exchange of banking information
• Coin Systems, a global provider of shared ledger solutions enabled by JPM Coin
• Onyx Digital Assets, a blockchain network that enables the tokenization and creation of various types of digital assets
• Blockchain Launch, web3 innovation entity focused on conceptualizing and building new applications at the forefront of blockchain technology.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan partnered with Oliver Wyman to promote deposit tokens that symbolize bank money on open networks.