BNY, a global financial services company, announced the appointment of Madiha Sattar as managing director and Growth Ventures partner, in a global role based in the UAE at the start of Abu Dhabi Finance Week. We got the opportunity to sit down with her to learn more.
In this role, Sattar joins the leadership team of BNY’s Growth Ventures business, which harnesses the company’s scaled platforms to build new businesses that sit at the intersection of technology, data, and investment solutions.
Madiha Sattar, managing director and Growth Ventures partner, BNY Mellon
As Growth Ventures partner, Sattar will play a role in working with clients in the region to build and invest in regional and global opportunities across financial markets data and analytics, wealth technology, and alternative assets data and distribution. To learn more about Growth Ventures and her goals for the company in the role, Mark Walker, editorial director, The Fintech Times caught up with Sattar.
How did the new Growth Ventures role come about?
Growth Ventures is a business unit within BNY that is focused on building, investing in and commercialising new technologies that are adjacent to the bank’s core business.
For those who aren’t familiar with the core business, we hold custody of $50trillion of assets. In other words, 20 per cent of the world’s financial assets. We are the number one settlement and clearing organisation of US Treasuries as well as the number one collateral management provider.
We also do fund admin and are an asset manager in our own right, with two trillion of assets under management. Additionally, we provide critical infrastructure for capital markets and financial markets globally. But despite all this, we need to remain progressive.
We need to remain on the cutting edge of technology. So for example, blockchain is now a dedicated business vertical and has been for several years at BNY, because so much of what we do at the end of the day involves tracking assets.
As such, blockchain for us is no longer an emerging technology – it’s a core technology. But there are a number of emerging technologies where we think we can still be quite progressive. These fit in within the (not so new anymore) CEO’s, Robin Vince, vision. He is trying to transform the bank both from a culture perspective and a technology perspective.
For example, from a tech point of view, we are platforming some key pieces of tech across all of our businesses. From a cultural perspective, we are breaking silos between businesses. We are taking a ‘one BNY’ approach.
As part of this overall evolution of the company, we set up a business unit called Growth Ventures, which incubates, buys, builds and invests in new technologies.
Why is Growth Ventures important?
Last year we set up Alpheya, a wealth tech firm in the UAE, through Growth Ventures. This firm was set up in partnership with ADQ and Lunate and was given $300million of funding on day one. It’s building wealth tech in the region, for the region, from the region. But soon enough the tech will go global.
One of our thematic pillars is wealthtech. Another is data analytics and AI for financial markets for which we already have a software platform and we want to commercialise it in MEA with strategic partners.
A third theme is the distribution of alternative and private assets to retail investors. We want to give retail users access to private credit, real estate, VC, and private equity. We have built a new platform for that in the US, but it has not arrived here yet,
The team has, historically, been in New York for the most part, but the Middle East is a high priority for this business, as evidenced by the setup of Alpheya. We wanted to have a person on the global leadership team of Growth Ventures based in the GCC to set up strategic partnerships with UAE partners, KSA partners and Qatar partners. These are the three markets in particular we are quite focused on
By bringing in co-investors from this region for inorganic activity, we want to help set up businesses, ventures and partnerships to commercialise some of these products.
We also plan to invest globally in these thematic pillars and we think there are investors here that would be interested in them..
My first order of business is to identify and work with those partners and these investors, here, now. But that said, my role is global. While this is my initial project, there will be other projects I get involved with globally for Growth Ventures, and given my background in tech, I’ll also be advising on product development for the New York team.
Is BNY Mellon trying to achieve something similar to that of a super-app with multiple components in one platform?
A good comparison of what we are trying to achieve can be made with Careem. I worked there between 2018 and 2024, and when I joined, the company was looking to expand beyond ride-hailing. I had the opportunity to build and launch many of the new verticals at the company, including fintech offerings as well as food and delivery, to name a few.
Very quickly we realised that we needed certain platform components for a super app that would enable us to give a consistent experience to users regardless of the service they’re using.
Examples of that would be:
payments experience
the loyalty and rewards experience
the design and UI and US UX experience
the customer service and help engagement
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, you want the customer to have a great and unified experience across your services. You want to show up as one brand and one experience. It’s also more efficient as you’re not developing multiple tech stacks for multiple businesses. It’s far more scalable from a technology perspective.
At BNY, some of the platforms we’re building have a KYC and compliance angle – so we need this to be consistent across the entire system.
For example, a customer should not have to onboard themselves through different systems to use different products at BNY. Data is another good example. We want our data to be a platform across our entire business. There are some core organisational and engineering changes we are making to embed that platform model across the business.
Would you say you are more ‘tech’ than ‘fin’?
I’d like to think my heart is in both. Prior to Careem, I worked in financial services for several years in corporate strategy roles. One of the companies I worked at was J.P. Morgan and that was one of the more interesting organisations to do that kind of role in because it is in every financial service imaginable, from:
retail
commercial
corporate investment banking,
asset management
wealth management
payments
The role gave me an opportunity to think about business strategy across all of those protocols. This gave me the platform to jump into technology at Careem, where I had the opportunity to build and launch the fintech businesses of Careem.
So really, for me, I can’t separate the two, and this role was a great opportunity to actually bring both ‘fin’ and ‘tech’ together.
Is the long-term vision to make these growth pillars a fundamental part of the bank like blockchain?
That is one path. One path could be that we incubate new things and then they become a core part of our business. Another path is that we set up net new entities outside the bank, like Alpheya, where we give the company control over its own destiny. We will contribute IP, team members, and capital contribute capital.
We will also bring in other co-investors, but we want to give this thing a life of its own and have it be autonomous and run like a startup, and not be held back in any way, shape or form, by any regulatory or other frameworks that BNY has to operate under.
A third path involves pursuing certain technologies that already exist within the bank, but we think may need some dedicated love, budget, attention, speed, and agility. In these instances, we pull them out of the bank organisationally. Then, we supercharge them within Growth Ventures, and then they can potentially return to the bank.
Is BNY holding onto the success of growth for itself or is it going to market?
We have a data analytics and AI platform for financial markets. The users of this platform can be, but are not limited to:
asset owners
asset managers
central banks
asset managers within banks
wealth managers
This is a platform that enables them to access public and private market data from various sources. They can then manage that data, store it, and use machine learning to make sense of that data. Then, our software also provides analytics on top of that data. Users can view their portfolio performance, risk exposure, and for example, be able to check accounting analytics to meet reporting needs.
This platform was a core infrastructure of BNY. We have now put it into Growth Ventures, and we’re now running it like a fintech, like a SaaS company, and this is, in some cases, being co-sold, or going jointly to market with the BNY core business.
But this isn’t always the case. In many instances, we’re selling it as a data platform. Even if you’re not a client, you still can use our data analytics platform, and it can pull in data from BNY if you custody assets with us.
How are you going to source new ideas?
We have a very smart corporate strategy team at BNY that comes takes in input from all of us. They listen to the business leaders of the different business verticals and a host of other inputs too.
Like any other organisation, we do strategy reviews regularly. This is a combination of looking at trends: where we think the business is moving, combined with where we have a right to win. Afterall, we don’t want to be in every business that we think will be successful just for the sake of being in it – we have to have a right to win.
We consider the assets that we would bring to that new play, whether it’s technology, operations, customer relationships, brand, or whatever it might be, and link this to our right to win.
Then, we go through a list of opportunities and decide how we should tackle them. In some cases, the answer is, let’s build it or incubate it from Growth Ventures.
However, sometimes we might say ‘Let’s go do something inorganic and either acquire a target or set up a new company that can fail, which can be done either through Growth Ventures or another part of the bank.
Or in some cases, the answer would be let’s do this through our core business vertical.
Why expand in the Middle East?
There are a few reasons. One is, that the demands of customers of BNY’s core business align with the emerging themes in the Middle East. For example, governments here are backing the growth of central banks, asset owners and managers, and capital markets. These are areas we’re looking to get involved in.
If you think about the rate at which sovereign wealth assets are growing and the rate at which international, foreign asset managers are setting up here, and not just moving people for tax arbitrary provisions, but moving assets here and investing assets out of here – these guys need services. In some cases, these same firms are customers of BNY somewhere else in the world.
These firms now have capital here that needs to be custody management and fund administration, as well as having some sort of cross-border payment infrastructure – we can do all this from here,
The growth of the capital markets is another big thing to consider. The UAE capital markets are now valued at a trillion dollars, and KSA is one of the top 10 capital markets. As such, the IPO market in these places is only getting better.
We’ve been in the region for a few decades already, but no we’re really ramping up our presence. We got our ADGM licence, we’re a part of the DIFC, and in the KSA, we have an office which has expansion plans in line with the KSA’s technology development goals.
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