Carolyn Weinberg has spent her career driving the transformation of markets, but perhaps her greatest mission lies ahead by harnessing what she calls the digital superhighway to reimagine what it means to move money and help power the future of markets around the world.

You joined BNY in 2025 as the company’s first Chief Product and Innovation Officer. What inspired you to take on this role?

“BNY has such unique central positioning and scale, client trust that spans generations, and deep expertise across so many areas that are fundamental to market infrastructure globally—all of which make it a true, world-class leader. 

At the same time, global capital markets are at an inflection point today, with clients looking to move money faster, 24/7—and they’re increasingly leveraging new technologies, like blockchain technology and digital assets, to do this. I wanted to help shape this historic moment at a company that touches assets from custody to payments to investment management and so much more. And I thought, ‘BNY does all of that.’

What does a day in the life of BNY’s Chief Product and Innovation Officer look like?

I spend a lot of time thinking about ‘the great unlock’ for our clients and how we can create a flywheel of value for them by taking our many capabilities and figuring out how to offer new, combined solutions, as well as new categories of growth, such as digital assets. Essentially, it’s about interlocking and interlinking all the different types of business our clients do with us to help them further scale and grow.

BNY just released a thought leadership paper that explores how digital assets and blockchain technology is poised to reshape the future of financial infrastructure. What’s the topline message? 

We outline in the paper that we’re seeing two major megatrends in the marketplace. First is a drive for increased speed and certainty of settlement in capital markets. And second is the mainstreaming of digital assets, which like any other asset class, needs to be securely serviced, managed and custodied. 

The confluence of these trends means we have a new financial system that's evolving and emerging, linking traditional infrastructure with digital solutions, to enable faster, 24/7 transactions, more certainty of settlement, and greater capital efficiencies for our clients and their clients.

This evolution isn’t about blockchain technology immediately replacing traditional systems — it’s about the two working in concert to create new possibilities over time and in phases to ultimately shape a new financial future.

What are these digital solutions and how is BNY leveraging them?

There’s blockchain or distributed ledger technology, which is used to record transactions. There are cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the currencies you’re transacting with on the blockchain. Then we have tokenization, which is how you represent a transaction or asset on the blockchain. And there’s digital cash, such as stablecoins, which you can use to buy or sell something on the blockchain. 

Unlike cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are backed by a traditional currency, like the U.S. dollar. So it’s like having a dollar in your pocket — just imagine that dollar on a blockchain, in the form of a stablecoin. A stablecoin is backed by treasuries, and those treasuries need to be held somewhere. That’s where BNY comes in. We can help with the investments of these treasuries and the safekeeping of them. 

We also offer on-chain data, which means we can represent what different values are on a blockchain and help provide a transparent digital ledger. Additionally, we can maintain a client’s official books and records, as well as manage settlements for their funds. So, through our single and interconnected digital assets platform, we’re helping build a trusted foundation for the future to enable digital assets to be used at institutional scale. 

The kind of scale BNY brings matters because it not only turns innovation into something usable for clients, but it also helps give them confidence. BNY processes trillions of dollars in traditional payments every day. We hold trillions in traditional custody. Since we maintain the highest standards of control, clients know our operational backbone is reliable and resilient. 

We’re using that same level of care to help ensure our digital assets clients, such as those looking to issue stablecoins or tokenize their funds, feel confident as they consider these technologies to power their businesses further.

What do you see for the future of finance?

One phrase: always-on. It means that someday individual companies, corporations and financial institutions will be able to make a transaction at anytime, anywhere in the world, in real time. We are working towards that as an institution and an industry.

Take, for example, that you're the treasurer of a large corporation with offices in the U.S. and Singapore. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could maintain all your cash balances in one place and move them instantaneously to make payroll or do the transaction that you need in Singapore relative to New York, instead of having bank accounts, revolvers and credit facilities all over the world? Imagine if you could move your money wherever you need, whenever you need, and manage your business better through always-on finance.

I took my daughter to the bank the other day. She said, ‘You can take money out at a bank?’ It was truly shocking to her. The future of finance isn’t about dollar bills. It’s going to be about instantly moving money on your phone. To help shape what that future holds, that’s really exciting to me.”

To learn more about BNY's Digital Assets solutions, visit our website at BNY.com/digitalassets or contact your relationship manager.

This interview was conducted and written by Liz Ozaist, BNY.