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Applied math is used to solve complex problems in areas ranging from astrophysics to econometrics and earning a B.A. in the discipline years ago from Harvard College instilled in Carolyn Weinberg the need to first define problems, then to use math tools innovatively to solve them.
She has taken that approach as chief product and innovation officer at two of the largest global financial-services firms—currently at BNY—as the industry undergoes fundamental changes to its technological and operational infrastructure.
"Innovation is very much about what do we have today, how do we make it best in class, and then how do we extend it to enable new use cases and solutions," she said.
Early on, Weinberg foresaw the global financial system moving toward 24/7 trading across asset classes and requiring instant and secure settlement, and that blockchain technology would be a key enabler. During her six years at BlackRock, she spearheaded the development and 2022 launch of a private institutional trust designed to track bitcoin's price. It evolved into BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), the first public bitcoin-based fund available to retail investors.
The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), conceived and developed under Weinberg's guidance, launched two years later. Issued and traded on a public blockchain, and a precursor to tokenized money market funds, it enabled qualified investors to earn USD yields.
Carlos Domingo, cofounder and CEO of Securitize, a fintech company that worked with Weinberg to develop BUIDL, recalled her conviction that asset tokenization and blockchain would modernize financial markets.
"What stood out to me early on was her ability to see both the long-term opportunity and what it would take to make it real inside large institutions," Domingo said.
BNY enabled the BUIDL fund's interoperability between digital and traditional markets. Weinberg sees interoperability between digital and traditional assets as critical to digitizing financial markets, and BNY's building of infrastructure connecting digital and traditional markets, along with its custody, payments, cash and collateral functions, prompted her interest in working at the bank.
"I wanted to work at BNY because the future is about speed, certainty, customization at scale, and technology in the financial markets," she said. "[BNY has] a central position to really transform markets and enable them to grow at speed."
Since arriving at BNY in February 2025, Weinberg has overseen several blockchain initiatives, including its collaboration with Goldman Sachs to offer tokenized money-market-fund shares and launching the BNY Dreyfus Stablecoin Reserves Fund. BNY is the custodian and sub-advisor on Securitize's tokenized fund dedicated to AAA-rated collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) that was launched in October.
"Bringing AAA CLO exposure on-chain helps open access to a large, established structured-credit market in a format that can benefit from improved distribution, more flexible settlement, and more transparent digital recordkeeping," Domingos said.
He added that rather than seeing tokenization as an abstract innovation, Weinberg understood the technology and "immediately understood that the real opportunity lay in applying it to a genuine market need."
To define problems, Weinberg said, she seeks understanding at the "molecular level" by asking numerous questions. She also pulls expertise from across the bank into 90-minute meetings twice a week to discuss and debate what needs to be accomplished and how to get there.
"I need the analyst to be just as vocal as the senior managing director," she said.
For the big picture questions involving the future of banking and the financial markets she regularly holds more intimate meetings with a half dozen or fewer participants. In terms of sparking her own ideas, Weinberg said she "obsesses" over solving both big-picture issues as well as immediate ones. But her best ideas rarely happen when sitting at a desk.
"Some of my best ideas come when hiking with my dog or kids or having conversations on a chairlift and imagining how the world will be," she said.
