BNY is building and deploying digital employees to unlock capacity for human employees. 

Digital employees are agentic systems that can autonomously perform tasks alongside humans to enhance productivity and provide intelligent decision support, according to BNY. 

The payments team is deploying these digital agents to complement the staff, Julie Gerdeman, executive platform owner for BNY’s Global Payments and Trade, told FinAi News. Within payments, digital employees can validate payments, read vendor addresses on cross-border transactions and verify the API and country code. 

When done by a person, it took five or six minutes. “Now, [these] are clearing in under 30 seconds,” Gerdeman said. “That leads to our open investigations in payments dropping by nearly 80%.”  

AI at BNY

With digital employees in place, BNY is also getting AI directly into the hands of employees. 

Every BNY employee is trained to use its enterprise AI platform, Eliza, Gerdeman said. At the end of the second quarter, BNY had 46,500 full-time employees, according to its earnings supplement.  

Eliza is built in line with the financial institution’s data, risk, legal and compliance standards, according to BNY.  

With 100% trained to use Eliza, adoption of AI at BNY is growing: 

• 60% of employees use AI daily; and 

• 50% of employees build their own agents. 

“At BNY, we continue to view AI as one of the most important long-term opportunities for our company and for society more broadly,” Chief Executive Robin Vince said during BNY’s July 15 earnings call.  

FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas, will include speakers from Fifth Third and Capital One as well as a fireside chat with U.S. Bank SVP – Lending Operations Group Manager Suzanne Rathbun. To learn more about the 2026 event and register, visit here.