Barker, BNY's Global Head of Treasury Services and Depositary Receipts, discusses how she's moving payments further into the future for clients.
Transcription:
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Chana Schoenberger (00:10):
Hi, I'm Chana Schoenberger. I'm the editor in Chief of American Banker, and I have with me here today Jennifer Barker, who is the head of Treasury Services and depository receipts at BNY. Welcome.
Jennifer Barker (00:20):
Thank you. It's nice to be here
Chana Schoenberger (00:22):
And congratulations.
Jennifer Barker (00:23):
Thank you.
Chana Schoenberger (00:24):
So just to start off, what's the biggest challenge you're facing in your role today, and how are you handling it?
Jennifer Barker (00:31):
The biggest challenge in our industry is just the pace of innovation, the pace of new entrant from a competitor standpoint and the continuing need to evolve the technology platform. So it's marrying all of those things together and also keeping pace with the consumer and the corporate expectations are changing every minute. So how do you blend all of those things together?
Chana Schoenberger (00:52):
Yeah, that's a lot. So what do you find that clients are asking you for?
Jennifer Barker (00:56):
Clients are asking for speed and simplicity and a lot of insight into the data that we provide. And so we clear about $3 trillion of payments every day. There's a lot of insight in there and a lot of things we can do to help our clients be successful, be it save money, get more efficient, or identify other risks or other improvement opportunities. And so clients are really asking us to help them with that, as well as just making it easy.
Chana Schoenberger (01:21):
Yeah, there's a lot going on in payments these days.
Jennifer Barker (01:24):
Yes, for sure.
Chana Schoenberger (01:25):
Is there a part of the payments universe that you find the most exciting?
Jennifer Barker (01:29):
Oh, there's so many exciting things about payments, because payments has really moved from beyond just a way to send money from point A to point B. I mean, obviously that's a very important part of what payments do, but payments are about how do you use payments to grow your business? How do you use payments to better control your risk? How do you use payments to reach new clients and new customers? And so the opportunity to really make payments front and center from a commercial perspective is a huge opportunity. The second is ai. AI is a really interesting use case in the payment space, whether it's, again, more insight for our clients, help keeping them safer or just routing them more efficiently and faster.
Chana Schoenberger (02:05):
And which of these use cases are you doing with ai?
Jennifer Barker (02:08):
We're doing all three. Yeah. So we are big adapters of AI at BNY, and particularly in the payment space. There's dozens of applications that we're looking at and how to deploy them, and some are deployed and some are still working on.
Chana Schoenberger (02:20):
Interesting. Okay. Turning to leadership, what have you learned about leadership now that you're a senior executive that nobody told you when you were junior?
Jennifer Barker (02:31):
Yeah, I'd say that it's an excellent question. The more senior you get, the more complexity you manage and the more that you don't directly touch things anymore. So it may sound like a really obvious statement, but there's a lot of different ways to think about how to manage that. So really, as a leader, our job is to create clarity and cut through the complexity, be simple and have simple messaging, and really provide clarity. It's also to provide capacity for the organization to execute the strategy and the agenda, and it's also to energize the business to be able to execute that. And so no one ever sat me down and told me that, but as you get more senior, those are the things that you learn. Those are your primary roles as a leader. And I think second is just keep listening. Always keep asking questions. No matter where you are in the world, no matter who you're speaking to, the organization, whether it's engineering operations, your product team, your risk team, always just keep learning and keep asking questions.
Chana Schoenberger (03:27):
An issue that Wall Street is facing broadly right now is convincing a younger generation that a career at a bank is a career filled with purpose that it matters. How would you sell them on this idea?
Jennifer Barker (03:41):
The banking industry is so foundational to our economy, and you're helping small businesses achieve their goals. You're helping middle market companies sell more toys and clothing and everything that we as consumers need and touch every day. And it's also a way to really help expand the financial services industry to the end and underbanked in this country, which is also a really important part of the banking industry, and helping expand payments to make it easy for everybody.
Chana Schoenberger (04:09):
So where do you find the purpose in your job?
Jennifer Barker (04:12):
The purpose in my job is two things. I love to help clients. I love to help clients solve their problems, whether that's saving money, getting more efficient, whatever their problem statements are. And the second is I love working with the teams and I love helping bring up junior members of the organization, mentor them, and just help show them the opportunity. There's so many opportunities that exist working in banking, and just help 'em show the path and help guide them there.
Chana Schoenberger (04:36):
That's great. Okay. When you think about the issues that are facing your sector of the industry right now, how can banks manage them?
Jennifer Barker (04:46):
Yes. And so there's speed, which we have to adjust to be very quick, but you have to do it in a safe and sound manner. And the way that you do that, one of the primary mechanisms is technology. And so it's really looking at having the right technology infrastructure, trying to eliminate legacy infrastructure, which a lot of financial institutions still have. Incorporating things like ai, APIs and all of the other advanced technology to really keep pace, but deliver that safely and soundly to the industry and to our clients.
Chana Schoenberger (05:17):
Great. Great. Okay. What keeps you up at night?
Jennifer Barker (05:22):
What keeps me up at night is probably just balancing the pace of change, but also as a leader, we have a very unique responsibility to communicate that change. And so what I think about a lot is we're going through a lot of change strategically every day, new technologies, how do I make sure that the teams know what is we're trying to do, can execute against the strategy and have all the right tools to be able to do that because things are changing, new skills are needed, new technologies. And so I think a lot about that balance.
Chana Schoenberger (05:50):
Do you have a good example of some change that you've dealt with recently?
Jennifer Barker (05:55):
Sure. So with ai, we have about 94% of our employees at the company are trained in ai. And the way that we do that is we make AI accessible to everybody and we allow our employees to build agents. And so we provide a lot of training. We have about 10,000 of our employees building agents. And what's interesting is that most of them are not in the engineering team. They're in operations or product or in the client facing organizations. And so that's one way we really tried to think differently and harness the power of ai.
Chana Schoenberger (06:23):
Is there an AI agent that you're using?
Jennifer Barker (06:26):
Me personally, yeah. Yes. There's a lot of AI agents that I use. One of the agents that I use is around research because things happen so quickly in the payments industry because a global business, about half of our businesses outside of the us And so building agents to help us keep on top of changes, industry trends, client trends is a really helpful way to be able to do that.
Chana Schoenberger (06:49):
That's
Jennifer Barker (06:50):
Great. Alright.
Chana Schoenberger (06:51):
Well thank you very much and congratulations again. Thank you. Thank you so much.
