Leave Without a Plan | BNY CEO Robin Vince

I will be better for myself, and I will be better for you if I've actually sat back, thought about the world and been super purposeful about this. So, I really did explore what I wanted to do next.

I was too young to be an advisor. I needed to just get back in the thick of it.

We saw the potential in the company. We thought we understood why that potential had not been fully realized.

This company, our clients, our investors and our people, they deserve the BNY that can be. So, we are going to go for that.

Of course. Well, Steve, it's good to be with you. Congratulations on the podcast. Great success so far. Look, my beginning, I was born in the UK. My parents are still alive. We moved when I was seven years old to France, where we lived just outside Paris. They were there for about 10 years. I spent the first half there, went to school in France, and then I completed my schooling in the UK, ended up going on to university in the UK, and then started working right afterwards.

Yeah, it was my dad's job. He worked for IBM, and it was their European headquarters at the time. Worked in their software and services division at the time.

Well, as a kid, I was very lucky because I had this opportunity, and of course, I didn't fully appreciate at the time, like many things, when you're young, you don't necessarily always enjoy or appreciate the lessons at the time, but being plunged into a very different environment, suddenly, I was living in a different country. I didn't speak the language. My parents sent me off to go to a one month kind of camp, as you'd call it in the United States, to get immersed in the language, which, of course, was absolutely terrible for me at the time, because I didn't speak any of the language, and it was all incredibly foreign. But those types of experience are quite formative, actually. And then having the good fortune to live in Paris. I mean, what kid wouldn't want to be a teenager in the 80s, living in Paris, and being able to enjoy that whole environment. So, for me, it was terrific. And my dad, who's got a background in math, he was actually a math scholar at Cambridge, he had a very first principles way of thinking, which ended up, again, I don't think I appreciated it at the time, in fact, I know I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I certainly appreciate it now, in terms of some of those lessons.

Sure, they were definitely my inspiration. My mom lived actually in the Caribbean, in Curacao, which was a Dutch colony once upon a time, and my grandfather worked out there, and so, she was actually born there and grew up there. So, it's probably not surprising that when I was ultimately asked to move to the US, I was game for it.

I think that's right and they were supportive of it as well, because both having traveled internationally for their jobs and the opportunity, that was something that was a little bit in the DNA of the family, and I think that was super helpful for me.

You're right. When I was a kid, I enjoyed all sorts of different things. I actually enjoyed cooking. I remember going to restaurants, again we lived in France remember, and every now and again we'd go as a treat, we'd go to a nice restaurant there. And my parents wanted me to be able to enjoy and appreciate and have a sort of broad variety of exposures to things in France, which we did. I thought at one point maybe I'd be a chef, and I think I was eight years old, but that seemed like a cool thing to do. And then as I grew up, through schooling and through university, I actually didn't know what I wanted to do. And I remember somebody telling me once that the purpose of university isn't actually what you learn at university, it's that at university you learn how to think. And that was actually good advice with the benefit of hindsight, that is what I learned. I learned how to work, I learned how to be organized, I learned how to apply myself when it really counted, and I learned how to be able to think and analyze things. It's not the facts of the Who and the Why and the Where did something occur, but like the Why did it occur. And my dad, who always would come back in math, when I wanted to do my homework and I just wanted to get it done. 'Hey, Dad, you're great at math. Can we just get it done?' And he was like, 'No, no, that's not what we're going to do. We're going to go back to the first principles of, how does it work? And then we're going to try to break it down.' Which, at the time, was incredibly infuriating, but if I take those two things together, I think it's contributed this sense of curiosity and first principles thinking.

Now, don't, like, overdo the culinary thing, that was, like, you know, lots of eight-year-old kids want to be astronauts. So, you know, I think I fell into that same category of, I think you're meant as a kid to be able to dream the impossible and think about things, and there's no dose of practicality whatsoever about it. And why did I study French at university? Well, actually, it was a topic that I knew and liked, and I liked the language. I thought it was interesting, and I didn't really want to have to go through the grind of going to labs and doing sciences. I think there was an element of practicality around what I chose to study. So, you know, there was a certain efficiency drive probably in those choices.

Wow, this is real. You've really done your research on this. That's true. I think if you were to ask some of my contemporaries, they would say I understood the rubric. I studied, it was a four-year course, and in the last year, everything was on the last year. So, 100% of the grade, the degree and everything was focused on that last year, so I prioritized and balanced my life accordingly.

I don't think drifting is quite the term that I'd use. I think I would say I was purposeful about finding, to be fair, the sort of the balance. And remember going back to the premise of what is university about? Well, university is about learning how to think, it's meeting people, making friends, it's a different set of experiences. And I took some parts of it very seriously in the first year or two, and then I took other parts of it very seriously later on, including being super earnest. I remember going back in my fourth year of university and going back right at the beginning of September, whenever exactly the term started, and I was like, right, this is absolutely the year, and I'm going to be super focused on what it is that I need to achieve from a degree perspective, and I need a job, and so I really need to think about what it is that I'm going to do, and I really need to apply. And I applied myself in a super focused way. And to be fair to the subsequent employers, Goldman Sachs included, I think what they want is people who understand how to focus and deliver when it really matters, and if you can be efficient in how you do it, all the power to you.

Because of the people. I applied to a lot of different firms, it wasn't just finance actually. I did need to have a job, and I wanted to have a good job. I applied across a couple of different industries, consulting, finance, and I applied to quite a broad swath of different firms. And this was remember, in the days when you couldn't apply on the internet, it wasn't copy and paste, you actually had to write the forms and do all the stuff. I ended up getting three offers, one of them was from Goldman Sachs. And as you said, there was a time of their ascendancy in the market, because we're now in the very early 90s, and they'd had a real boom through the privatization era in the UK in the 80s, but they weren't a household name by any stretch at that point. And I wasn't sure what to do, so I actually asked Goldman, I said, 'Can I come back in for half a day, because I'd like to meet some more people, and actually just get a little bit better sense of it.' And they said, 'Absolutely.' And I went and I spent more time with people, and it was the attention of the people to being interested in me, an undergrad student, and I was meeting pretty senior people at the firm, and I just liked their intellectual curiosity. I liked the way they engaged. They seemed smart, they seemed driven, and I was like, this is the type of environment that I'd like to be in, and I picked the firm partly for the brand, but mostly not for the brand. It was really for the people and the environment that I thought I'd be joining.

It was intense, and the hours were long for sure, but I didn't really notice. But I was a kid. I was coming out of university, that's what I wanted to do. I think sometimes balance in life is very important. Rhythms in life, health, these things are super important, and you really can't compromise them. But there are certain times in your life where you're willing to skew more one way than another. You know, depending on the phase of life you're in. And this was the phase I was in, you know, in London, living in London for the first time, working at a global financial institution, you know, the world's my oyster. Why wasn't I going to be working hard and putting everything into it? That's what I was about at that time, and that's as it should have been, I didn't notice that.

I think it's very important, we talk a lot to our employees about the different rhythms, maintaining their own balance and looking after themselves from a health perspective. You know, we have just as an example, we provide a bunch of mental health benefits as well as regular health plans to our people, because it's very important, you can have people to talk to. We do care about balance. One of our comments that we say internally is we want to be a high performing and human organization. We don't view those two things to be opposite to each other. We want to be high performing. We want people who want to work at a high performing institution. We don't want to be B, we want to be an A or an A plus, but you don't have to always do that on the backs of your people.

Yeah, I know a lot of people who actually struggle with mental health in various different ways, and so I don't want to create some equivalence between the fact that, hey, I've had a tough day at work and a difficult environment, and those two things don't deserve to be on the same playing field, because people who really struggle with this, it's very important to help them. Having said that, of course, we all have ups and downs during our careers, and I've learned, and it is through the support of other people and also going through the moment, I've learned how I can react and calm myself down in those types of environments and actually process the situation and actually use that to actually get calmer in a crisis. And of course, the worst crisis always feels like the one you're going through right now at this particular moment, but it's useful, at least for me, to remember back to these other situations where I've learned to work the problem.

So I had just the greatest opportunity to keep learning and do different things. And I don't think about it almost as just one career, I think about it as almost a series of different careers within one place. So, if you actually break, 25 years is a long time, yes, but if you actually break it down into all of these different jobs and these different places, I never really felt like I was in the same place, doing the same thing. I was always growing and learning, and I had the opportunity, in addition to that, to do a lot of extra-curricular things, like I described the one that sort of worried me, and I thought I wasn't going to be able to be successful in but there were a dozen other things that I did. I was asked to run a task force or a group or chair a committee, and you sprinkle all of that in, it's actually a journey of lots of little pieces which were building on each other. And maybe I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but it was also just obviously equipping me to be able to do other things.

Well, it was one of those moments, for sure, where it could, it's a situation which can crush people, and in fact, it did crush people. I know people who went through that, and they sort of crumbled under the pressure, or it really wasn't for them. And then there are other people who were able to learn from it, and they were able to move through it. I was lucky in that respect. The moment that is probably most seared in my mind was being at the Federal Reserve over the Lehman weekend. I got a call, I remember I'd just come back from the gym, and my phone rang, and it was like, 9am something like that, 8.30, and I was asked by the CFO of Goldman at the time, 'Can you be at the Federal Reserve in 40 minutes?' And I was like, 'Why, what's happening?' 'Just come down. There are a few of us here.' And I think there were five of us on that day, it was Saturday morning of that weekend. And you had the same sort of four or five equivalent roles from different institutions. And I remember Jamie walking around, and obviously Lloyd was there, and again, I think there were five of us from our firm. Yeah, but that was, that was quite the weekend. That was a weekend we're going back up, 1,2,3, in the morning, on both nights and then Monday morning. It was sort of a different era.

I didn't think about it that way. I didn't enjoy it. I learned a ton from it, and with the benefit of hindsight, I benefited significantly from those learnings, all of those different experiences, there's no question.

I can't say I enjoyed much of it. The biggest lesson was, 'and this too shall pass.' There is something about things that feel super existential in the moment. And that was a moment where, I think in any financial institution, you felt there was potentially existential. Obviously, firms had been failing, Bear Stearns failed, Lehman Brothers failed, Merrill Lynch essentially failed and was sold. And so, you looked at that in that environment, and it feels kind of existential because nobody knows where it's going to end. I mean, it could have ended with the collapse of the US financial system, at least in theory. And so that feels existential, but understanding and seeing that, understanding how you process that, and then remembering that you know the sun actually will come up tomorrow. It may be different. The world may be different. It may be personally unsettling, it may be disruptive, it may be damaging, but at the end of the day, the sun will rise tomorrow and so let's work the problem and not be completely crushed by it. Easier said than done sometimes when you're living in that moment, but that was a big takeaway lesson for me.

Well, there was a gap year in between, actually. When I got to the end of my time at Goldman, it felt very natural to me. I'd done all of these different things. I had spent the first half of my career on the business, commercial side of the house, trading desk, markets, clients, all of those things. In the second half of my career, I'd learned a ton really, traveling through all of the rest of the company across risk and treasury and operations and regional management, and it was a great experience. But it did feel to me that there was an opportunity for me to do something more, and I kind of yearned to get back a little bit closer to markets and clients, and those things that I really had loved in the first half of my career. And so, I just felt that it was time, and I really wanted to do something like that, but I left with only that agenda in my mind.

Oh no, absolutely not.

You know, I'm a very lucky guy. After 25 years at Goldman Sachs, it's not as brave as it sounds.

I was 48, yeah.

100%.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, she was very happy with it, and actually got happier with it as time went on. She was a little bit...

She did. She thought that I was less happy towards the end. And look, you work in a large financial institution, you're doing a lot of things that are very important things. But she knew that I really loved the client side, the market side, and these other things. And so from her perspective, she actually now says that she thinks that I'm happier and more present and focused now as the CEO of a public company, than I was towards the end of my time at Goldman. Not because of the institutions, but just because of the fact that I've been purposeful about choosing something that I really want to do and that I love doing, and it allows me to show up a little differently. I just retired cold turkey, nothing. In fact, BNY, the leadership of BNY, called me on the same day that the news hit on the news wire that I was going to retire from Goldman. And this person, who's the person who did end up hiring me, said 'You should really come and work for us. You'd be great here.' And I said to him, 'Todd, I'm not going to, I'm going to take a gap year.' And he said, 'I've looked at the fine print. You only have to take six months off', which you did.

That's right. And he said, 'You only have to take six months off. I've looked at the fine print.' He's already looked at the fine print of your contract. Great. And, that's, you know, I was on the Management Committee of Goldman, and there's an expectation and requirement that you take six months break in between. And I was like, 'No Todd you don't understand, I'm going to take a gap year. I really want to reset myself.' And this was in September of 2019, and he said, 'Okay, well, let's have lunch.' And so, we had lunch, and then we had a breakfast, and then we had some meetings and discussions. And I said, 'I'm really sorry, but I really, really want to take the gap year.' And he said, 'You can have any job that you'd like.' And I was like, 'Yeah, but I want to take a gap year. I don't want to have any of those jobs. I want to take a break. I will be better for myself, and I will be better for you if I choose to do this, if I've actually sat back, thought about the world and been super purposeful about this, and not just decided to do something else because you had the kindness to call me and saw an opportunity.' So, I really did explore what I wanted to do next. I had some people who told me, gosh, you should work part time, why would you be full time? You should do boards, you should do private equity, all these different things. And then I had a bunch of advice that I thought was very succinct and very well put, but it boiled down to the fact that I was sort of made to be a principal, not an agent. I was too young to be an advisor, and I needed to just get back in in the thick of it. And two people who used to work for me, I asked them both to do me a favor, and I said, 'Would you do me a favor and write a one-page memo and this is the prompt for the memo. What do you think I should do next that I would be great at and that will make me happy?' That was the prompt. And it was an independent exercise. They each did it. They did a one-page answer, and they never knew that the other one had done it, and they both were 80, 90% overlapping. And that advice helped to shift my path definitively to saying, 'Okay, I should not retire at 48. I should not go and be on some boards. I should actually take seriously the idea of doing something that I'll enjoy.'

I genuinely did not know. I genuinely wondered whether I was going to go portfolio or whether I was going to go principal at the time. Now, then the phone in parallel was ringing. I was getting a lot of people calling. You should do this. You should do this, you should do this, you should do this. And so I took a bunch of advice. I probably had 50 coffees, breakfasts, lunches with different people.

Absolutely, because what you're trying to do with advice is distill it.

But she was fearful of me hanging around at home at the same time.

So, we ended up having...

She agreed that we would have coffee every morning at 11 o'clock, which we did.

There was something about that, I think. Something about, you know, I married you for life, not for lunch, something like that.

So first, I really resisted in that I spoke to him every month on the phone, and he would actually ask me for what did I think about particular situations? I don't know if it was an extended interview or conversation. In parallel, I was thinking about what I wanted to do. So, his first call to me was in September of 2019, I think it was in July, August that I finally said, 'You know what, I have done my thinking now, and it so happens that the first call was actually the best call, but I didn't think about it then. Not the best in terms of the best I can do, but the best that's the best fit for me for what I'd like to do, and I enjoyed, and I knew it was a possibility that they may ultimately want me to be the CEO, but it wasn't a decision that we'd made already at that time.

We saw as a leadership team, we saw the potential in the company. We thought we understood why that potential had not been fully realized. We understood the key assets that the company had, our people, our clients, and the underlying businesses, and we devised a strategy to really unlock that. Unlock it for our clients, unlock it, of course, for investors as a consequence, and do it in a way where our people were really part of the story and were driving and energizing that change. And we had that perspective, and we were talking earlier about the fact that I had the privilege of coming into this role where I feel like I had already had a successful career, and so I was willing to put my own reputation and career and credibility on the line to back the fact that I had that perspective as a team.

Yes, I didn't think it was a huge gamble, but it was a huge decision. There's a funny saying that used to be part of old Bank of New York folklore, which is when Alexander Hamilton, who founded our bank, the now famous Alexander Hamilton - when Alexander Hamilton left for the duel, he turned around to the leadership of Bank of New York, He said, 'Don't change anything until I get back.' Very confident. There was an element of that in the company. The company deserved, it had all of these great attributes.

So, of course, the company had evolved, and it's a joke, but there was an element inside, which is people knew, our clients knew. We had investors who saw it who'd been in the stock for a long time, and the first time I saw them, they were like, 'Robin, you've got to really do these things that need to be done, because we all think we can see it.' Our people knew the answer to the question. It just for one reason or another, and there are some very rational reasons why it hadn't happened before, the opportunity to unlock. And so with the leadership team, we said, right, this company, our clients, our investors and our people, they deserve the BNY that can be. So, goodness knows, we are going to go for that.

Culture. It was really having the people of the company want to change. And so making the case, explaining. And the first year, there was a lot of, I remember standing in multiple sessions where I said, 'You're going to have to trust me, that I have true conviction that we can do this. I will bring the belief.' And I remember about a year and a half in, I actually went to the same meeting a year later. It was a leadership team meeting, and said, I feel like I don't need to be the only one bringing the belief anymore, because I think we're all starting to see what really is possible and believe, but the hardest decision was, and the hardest bit about it is bringing a large group of people with you, because you know, if you're off in front by yourself, you're going to be awfully lonely and nothing will happen.

It's one of the first things that I wrote about my first shareholders letter, which was at the beginning of 2023, I'd been CEO for four or five months, and I wrote that we are going to take a decade-view of the opportunity. Now it's the board's decision around, ultimately, who leads the company, but the company deserved a long term mindset with short term hustle, and let's get on with it. And that's exactly the duality that I think, for me, has been needed in our company. A long term determination, setting out the vision, not just investing for the short term, but investing for things that will be important, 3,5,7,10 years from now. Investments in AI and innovation, restructuring the company, redoing operating and commercial models. We've done all of those things, and those things are all long-term bets. You don't do any of those things if you have a two-year point of view, but you've got to hustle in the meantime, because otherwise you never get to that point.

Which is actually the standard now, you'll notice all of the 8 G-SIBs have the same structure.

I am committed, as I was right from day one, to the fact that BNY deserves some consistency. It needs a long-term orientation, and we all have to hustle. I serve at the board's pleasure, like every other CEO does. Nothing about that changes. But in between now and that time, I've got to hustle, the leadership team's got to hustle, and we've got to remember the fact that the lack of consistency, the lack of long range thinking, and the lack of unlocking the potential of the company, did hold it back for quite a long time. We talked in that first shareholders letter about a lost decade because we hadn't used the time in furtherance of everything that was possible.

Well, the first thing is, you actually have to make the chairman, CEO bit manageable, and so being purposeful about how you use your time. That's super important. You know, none of us have infinite time. It doesn't matter what our respective jobs are, we all could do, spend a lot of time doing whatever that job it is. You have to decide, how much time am I going to spend on this? How much am I going to spend on that? And being purposeful, accessible, available, focused on the important things, not just consumed by the urgent things. And so, if you can get that right within the balance of work, then you actually have a fighting chance to not let that drive and seep out into the rest of your life, and then you lose balance with the rest of your life. Now I'm at a stage in my life where I'm very happy for a lot of what I do to be about two things, family and work. I don't play golf. I don't need this to be the time in my life when I learn to play golf. I'd love to learn - I used to sail when I was a little kid, I'd love to get back to being able to do that. Now is not the time. I'm focused on two things. And so, I've made my choices of time allocation, and so as a result of that, I get to show up super purposefully in those two things and try to do them both to the best of my ability.

Great to be with you. Steve, thank you.