I view it as a completely different thing than real-time payments. And in fact, in digital assets, some people do complete the two and view things like coins and Central Bank digital currencies as solutions to problems which I would actually argue that real-time payments might be a better solution for. So there is a little bit of overlap, but I do favor real-time payments more broadly the question of how to speed up payment rails and payment processes in the United States to make them more efficient.But then on digital assets, we think this is about the tech. We believed in the fact that distributed ledger technology, smart contracts that you can build on top of it have good opportunity over time. That’s many years, maybe several decades evolution.
It’s still early, hasn’t really been proven and we’ll see opportunities to have more efficiency, easier handling of certain asset types, think about things that aren’t standardized today.So they’re messy in the financial services system like real estate and loans probably speed up settlement there on tokenization as a sort of as a new form of handling assets. So we like all of those concepts. But in terms of the actual crypto, we’ve said all along, we’re going to be incredibly slow accrual before we run on digital assets broadly and cryptos are — it’s something that we’ve gone exceptionally slowly.Betsy Graseck I’m sorry, you broke up at the end. On crypto, you mentioned.Robin Vince We’ve gone exceptionally slowly.Betsy Graseck Yes. And just because of all of the opportunity — of all the infrastructure that you have I would think you would be an attractive place for crypto deposits.
I’m wondering if that’s something that you would agree with or not?Robin Vince I don’t particularly agree with that. No. I understand that there are other firms who’ve over time made it part of their business model to really attract a ton of cash in that space. We do not view ourselves as a crypto bank. We have a variety of clients. We have some clients who touch the digital assets ecosystem, but that’s not been a business strategy of ours to grow that aggressively.Betsy Graseck Okay. And then just lastly, on FedNow, it launches in the next quarter or so. Is that accurate? And is there a meaningful impact? Or is this, as you mentioned, a really long runway to have an impact on your revenues?Robin Vince It’s a longer runway. You have to get confirmation from the Fed about their exact launch plans because it has evolved a little bit.
But it’s a long runway. And it isn’t so much FedNow as real-time payments of which FedNow is one provider.Operator With that, that does conclude our question-and-answer session for today. I would now like to hand the call back over to Robin with any additional or closing remarks.Robin Vince Thank you very much, operator, and thank you, everyone, for your interest in BNY Mellon. If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to Marius and the IR team, and we wish you well.Operator Well, thank you. And this does conclude today’s conference and webcast. A replay of this conference call and webcast will be available on the BNY Mellon Investor Relations website at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today. Have a great day.
