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Over the past year, Laide Majiyagbe, global head of markets at BNY, has focused on a central question: what new possibilities can technology unlock in liquidity, collateral and short-term funding? Under her leadership, the bank has expanded into novel applications of distributed ledger technology, digital assets markets and tokenization.
A Nigerian-born engineer by training, Majiyagbe spent more than a decade in Goldman Sachs' liquidity business before moving to BNY. In the past five years at the bank, she has steadily expanded her responsibilities, overseeing the firm's collateral and liquidity financing operations, before being named global head of markets and a member of the executive committee earlier this year.
BNY is a sizable player in the U.S. Treasury market, settling more than $20 trillion in treasuries each year. LiquidityDirect, BNY's digital platform for managing cash, is a key part of this, automating investments, and executing trades. Originally a portal focused on money market funds, it's now a broader digital liquidity hub, thanks to work by Majiyagbe's team.
"We wanted to give the optionality to do more things in a single place," she said.
The platform now allows institutional investors to manage multiple investments in one place, automate compliance checks, and integrate directly with treasury systems used by corporate clients.
"Our clients started to say, 'Hey, I use SAP, I use this treasury workstation, but I like this technology so much that I'd like to use it in conjunction with those things to supplement my network,'" Majiyagbe said.
"The biggest compliment your client can give you on innovation is when they want to use your technology in the rest of their workflow," she added.
That client-driven approach also shaped her work on making access to tokenized money market funds a reality. Working with Goldman Sachs' digital assets platform, BNY now lets investors subscribe and redeem money market fund shares on LiquidityDirect where the corresponding value is represented through mirrored record tokenization on a blockchain. The bank said it was the first time institutional investors could access tokenized money market funds from several providers through a single platform.
Majiyagbe said one of the main things this achieved was making digital markets functional: "If the asset moves on a blockchain but the cash doesn't, you haven't really solved the problem, you've just created a headline."
Her team has applied similar thinking elsewhere, including in the expansion of the bank's CollateralOne platform, which gives buy-side firms more flexible access to financing and collateral mobility. Laide also cites BNY's investment in EquiLend and its use of EquiLend's 1Source blockchain platform for securities finance transaction recordkeeping as part of that broader push.
Outside of work, Majiyagbe serves on the board of directors of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, where she helps shape the governance and strategic direction of market infrastructure.
