5 questions with BNY Treasury Services’ Carl Slabicki

Carl Slabicki, managing director and co-head of global payments at BNY treasury services, is focused on keeping up with client demand by monitoring industry trends, innovating with the latest tech and prioritizing client engagement with products. 

To support these efforts, BNY has recently rolled out:

• Wove Investor: Allows investors to view information from multiple accounts in one place. 

• Wove Data: A cloud platform designed to manage data and gain insights. 

• Portfolio Solutions: A tool that boosts research efficiency. 

During the second quarter, BNY continued to aggregate its products, bringing all its investment capabilities to one place for clients, according to its June 12 earnings report. 

In an interview with Bank Automation News, Slabicki discussed his approach to leadership as well as how his team tackles projects and innovation. What follows is an edited version of that interview: 

Bank Automation News: BNY offers its automated smart routing solutions. What other solutions is your team working on? 

Carl Slabicki: Our team is focused on enhancing smart routing capabilities to provide a seamless experience for our clients across various segments such as banks, corporations and fintechs. We continually invest in global partnerships, leveraging 2,500 correspondent banking partners to enable cross-border payments and address market gaps. As the global landscape evolves, we are actively working to bridge together high-value, low-value and instant capabilities across this network into key markets, helping optimize the end-to-end experience of payment processing in a fragmented market. 

We are also prioritizing risk and fraud mitigation services for both domestic and international payments. By integrating various data points and pre-payment controls, we have enhanced our risk management framework and can now offer these tools to our clients for improved payment predictability. 

To bring together such capabilities in a simplified manner for our clients, we often collaborate with fintech partners to integrate best-in-class solutions for niche industry challenges. For instance, our partnership with Verituity enables us to offer BNY’s Vaia platform which is a comprehensive corporate-to-consumer payment solution, streamlining authentication, validation and payment choices. Our goal is to integrate the latest technology and capabilities available in the market with end-to-end workflow solutions, often through partnerships, that simplify and enhance client operations. 

BAN: How does your team approach innovation? 

CS: Our approach to innovation involves balancing three key factors in parallel. Firstly, we maintain active engagement with the industry by participating in organizations such as Swift, Nacha, The Clearing House, the U.S. Faster Payments Council and others. We take leading positions to shape industry direction by incorporating feedback from both banks and clients, thereby driving industry progress. 

Secondly, we align our development strategy with industry trends and market infrastructure advancements. By staying ahead of industry directions and demonstrating proof points such as being the first bank on instant payment rails such as The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments and FedNow, and certain new capabilities enabled by SWIFT, we ensure our readiness to meet future demands. 

Lastly, we prioritize client engagement, transparently sharing industry insights and aligning our innovations with client needs. This alignment of industry engagement, development strategy and client collaboration is critical to our innovation approach. 

BAN: What are clients asking for from treasury services? 

CS: Clients increasingly expect elevated industry standards, especially in financial services where the gap between capability and adoption is widening. RTP, FedNow and risk and fraud detection capabilities are yet to be fully integrated into daily business processes. Clients seek education on these available solutions and look to us for a consultative approach to ease their adoption. 

We focus on embedding new capabilities into existing client processes without requiring significant changes from them. For instance, when real-time payment capabilities are introduced, we integrate them on the back end, allowing clients to benefit from these advancements seamlessly. 

BAN: What global payment trends are you closely following? 

CS: We are closely monitoring several global payment trends, with three being front of mind: 

1. Cross-border money movement options: This includes high-value and low-value instant payments, and nonbank rails.
2. Enabling cross-border payments: We seek ways to participate directly with clients in facilitating these payments for specific use cases ranging from consumer to business needs.
3. Fraud information sharing: The industry’s efforts to use data for fraud prevention and payment protection are also a significant focus.

BAN: How would you describe your leadership style? 

CS: My leadership style emphasizes active participation and vocal leadership within the industry paired with real-life solutions and client collaboration. By ensuring that we are at the table with industry partners and taking leadership roles, we strive to align BNY, our clients and the industry towards a common direction. Our leadership in first-in-market pilot projects exemplifies our commitment to innovation and leading by example. 

Early-bird registration is now available for the inaugural Bank Automation Summit Europe in Frankfurt, Germany, on Oct. 7-8! Discover the latest advancements in AI and automation in banking. Register here and apply to speak here.