Yesterday, BNY Mellon announced that Caroline Butler becomes CEO of Digital Assets effective immediately. As BNY Mellon is the world’s largest custodian with $44 trillion in assets under custody, its role is one of the largest in the institutional digital asset sector.

BNY Mellon launched its institutional offering in October 2022, providing digital custody and management for both traditional and digital assets. Butler was responsible for delivering that solution.

She joined BNY Mellon in 2020 after a 21-year stint at JP Morgan, where she was most recently Head of Global Custody for the Americas. At BNY Mellon, Butler was promoted last month to chief executive of Custody Services. As the four-leaf clover necklace indicates, he hails from Ireland and attended Galway University.

“As institutional adoption of digital assets continues to evolve, we are committed to being a trusted provider of services to the broader financial ecosystem,” said Roman Regelman, BNY Mellon CEO of Securities Services and Digital. “I am pleased to have Caroline lead our company-wide initiatives as we accelerate our efforts around digital assets and other emerging technologies and solutions for our clients.”

BNY Mellon CEO Rob Vince has expressed his support for digital assets. On the January earnings call, he said that not adopting DLT “would be like being the custodian of 50 years ago and staying with paper and not adopting a computer. That won’t be us.”

Last year there were concerns that the Basel Committee could apply the same rules to cryptocurrency custody that it applies to banks that hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets. This would have involved custodians reserving a dollar of capital for every dollar of crypto held in custody, something that would not be feasible at any scale.

Since the assets in custody belong to clients, this would have been a substantial deviation compared to the custody of other assets. Along with other major conventional custodians, such as State Street and the Northern Trust, the companies advocated similar treatment for other assets. In December, the Basel Committee said that while crypto-specific risks need to be considered, it did not plan to impose capital requirements for custody.