BNY

The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, commonly known as BNY or by its prior brand name BNY Mellon, is an American international financial services company headquartered in New York City. It was established in its current form in July 2007 by the merger of the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation. Through the lineage of Bank of New York, which was founded in 1784 by a group that included Alexander Hamilton, BNY is regarded as one of the three oldest banks in the United States and among the oldest in the world. It was the first company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2024, it was ranked 130th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue, and a 2018 Fortune analysis identified it as the oldest company on the list. As of 2024, it was the 13th-largest bank in the United States by total assets and the 83rd-largest in the world. BNY is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.

BNY provides a wide range of financial services, including asset management, custody and securities services, government finance services, and pension plan management. The company serves diverse clients, including corporations, institutions, and individuals, offering financial expertise and technological platforms to support their objectives. The company's key subsidiaries include BNY Investments, BNY Pershing, and BNY Wealth. It is the world's largest custodian bank and securities services company. As of September 2024, BNY had $2.1 trillion in assets under management and $52.1 trillion in assets under custody and administration, making it the first bank to surpass $50 trillion. BNY has been named among Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies.

The first bank in the U.S. was the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, which was chartered by the Continental Congress in 1781; Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were among its founding shareholders. In February 1784, The Massachusetts Bank in Boston was chartered.

The shipping industry in New York City chafed under the lack of a bank, and investors envied the 14% dividends that Bank of North America paid, and months of local discussion culminated in a June 1784 meeting at a coffee house on St. George's Square which led to the formation of the Bank of New York company.^{[citation needed]} The bank operated without a charter for seven years. The initial plan was to capitalize the company with $750,000, a third in cash and the rest in mortgages, but after this was disputed the first offering was to capitalize it with $500,000 in gold or silver. When the bank opened on June 9, 1784, the full $500,000 had not been raised; 723 shares had been sold, held by 192 people. Aaron Burr had three of them, and Hamilton had one and a half shares. The first president was Alexander McDougall and the Cashier was William Seton.

Its first offices were in the old Walton Mansion in New York City. In 1787, it moved to a site on Hanover Square that the New York Cotton Exchange later moved into.

The bank provided the United States government its first loan in 1789. The loan was orchestrated by Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, and it paid the salaries of United States Congress members and President George Washington.

The Bank of New York was the first company to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange when it first opened in 1792. In 1796, the bank moved to a location at the corner of Wall Street and William Street, which would later become 48 Wall Street.

The bank had a monopoly on banking services in the city until the Bank of the Manhattan Company was founded by Aaron Burr in 1799; the Bank of New York and Hamilton vigorously opposed its founding.