The financial services industry is bursting at the seams with changes as DeFi and digital banks become the standard. At the heart of this industry lies a 234-year old company that’s constantly innovating: BNY Mellon.
Fuelled by a customer-centric philosophy, the “bank of banks” is known for its world-class tech products and solutions—making businesses around the world more efficient and productive.
Our Director of Marketing APAC, Aadil Bandukwala, and Co-Founder & CTO, Harishankaran K sat down for an enlightening conversation about the technologies, opportunities, and culture at the investment company of the world with two of its accomplished leaders: Nitin Chandel, Managing Director, and Shobhit Chauhan, Director of Technology at BNY Mellon.
Read on for some takeaways from the conversation or watch the full discussion below.
BNY Mellon’s current investments
Nitin begins, “Our biggest investment right now is in data and analytics. With the trillions in assets that we handle, we’re cognizant of the immense amount of data that we hold. Our focus is on harnessing its power across our operations and teams, in parallel to the offerings we constantly give our clients.”
In fact, BNY Mellon recently unveiled three offerings last year in their Data And Analytics Solutions: Data Vault, Distribution Analytics, and ESG Data Analytics which have all been hugely popular among their clients.
He adds, “We’re also strengthening our cloud capabilities. We’re a company that’s over 234 years old and we work with a mix of legacy and modern systems. Moving these to the cloud is a task that’s still in its initiation phase.”
Addressing the elephant in the room, Nitin says “When we talk about tech investments at a bank, we can’t ignore the fact that we operate in a traditionally heavily-regulated environment. While this is something that has impeded the migration to new technologies in the past, we’re making rapid progress now.”
Recently, initiatives like the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) and the Digital India Programme have encouraged the growth of digital in banking in India, and companies like BNY Mellon are rejoicing.
Shobit says, “The scale that we operate at is huge. Enterprise resilience is always going to be our most prioritized investment to provide our best to our clients around the clock. We’re constantly watching the market conditions, revisiting the competitive landscape analyses, and making sure that we’re one step ahead.”
What the growing MNC looks for in early talent
“While having a solid knowledge of a programming language is objectively desirable in a candidate, we mainly look at your intellectual curiosity. Are you eager to learn? Do you tend to get bound by the limits of technology?” Shobhit says.
Nitin agrees. “We look at your aptitude and attitude. If you’re not an expert at a tool or a language, that’s okay. It can be taught using the resources we have, as long as you’re a quick and enthusiastic learner.”
The discussion quickly digresses into one about the programming languages they were taught in school. “When I started learning computer science, I was trained in Pascal, FoxPro, and Visual Basic. Many young folks nowadays haven’t even heard of these!” Nitin says half-jokingly.
Aadil adds, “They taught us QBasic when we were in the seventh grade - and we wrote commands and whole programs in our notebooks. With the multi-featured IDEs that exist today, learning a programming language has never been this convenient.”
“Technology is evolving at a faster pace every year. Being passionate about solving problems and cultivating a habit of not getting attached to a single language or tool are some common characteristics in all of our employees,” says Nitin.
“To look for these qualities in candidates, we ask questions like: What are some personal projects you’ve worked on? Is there a variety of internships that you’ve taken on? What are the periodicals that you’ve read? Have you participated in hackathons?” he adds. “We use HackerRank’s offerings for our hiring processes globally - the library questions and the pair programming interface in Interview have especially proved to be beneficial.”
Hari offers his perspective on how a candidate can set himself up for success in a hiring process like BNY Mellon’s. “There are tons of opportunities to become a proficient self-taught programmer now. There are multiple platforms offering courses and certifications, open-source projects to contribute to, and experts in the field that you can connect with via social media. Students must take advantage of this. The importance of pedigree is quickly fading, and being replaced by skills,” he says.
Talking about the exciting opportunities that await at BNY Mellon, Shobhit says, “When you start building products and features here, you can expect to work with Spring Boot and SonarQube, to name a couple tools. Our data lake is built on Snowflake and we’re even weighing some new technologies for metadata management.”
BNY Mellon is hiring right now - take a look at their open positions here.
