BNY’s wealth boss on politics, processes and portfolio management

The Leaders’ Stage of the IMpower FundForum in Monaco was the venue for a discussion between Jose Minaya from BNY and PWM’s Yuri Bender, analysing the shape of the successful wealth manager of the future. Mr Minaya is unusual in the world of wealth management, coming from a background of ‘responsible investing’ rather than aggressive investment banking.

He took over as global head of the BNY Investments & Wealth business, overseeing $2.2tn in assets, in 2024, joining BNY from Nuveen, where he was CEO of the asset manager of TIAA, with a major focus on environmental strategies. As group chief investment officer, he had previously overseen global investments, including equities, fixed income, real estate, private markets and natural resources. This followed 25 years doing the rounds of big brand firms including AIG, Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan.

The proud son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, he remains close to US educational institutions where he earned his degrees. He serves on the Board of Trustees of Manhattan College and the Board of Advisors of the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, as well as advising the Smithsonian Institution museum group and the Robert Toigo Foundation, which aims to mould a new generation of financial leaders.

Your former colleagues describe you as a traditional-looking guy, but very innovative in managing assets beyond equities and bonds, investing in forestry and wines. Everybody at the moment is talking about private assets, but should we be looking at a much broader menu with many different dishes?

I was building alternatives in my previous life, explaining to people about the possibility of inflation, rising rates, volatility and geopolitical uncertainty. Today, people understand that academic discussion, but there’s an urgency about delivering these outcomes. So it’s less about private equity and private credit, it’s about correlation, and how you deliver solutions to clients that lead them to the outcomes they need, whether that is principal protection, an income conversation, or a utility conversation. The more access you have to different assets, the better your outcome should be.

In that conversation with the client, and the process of managing money for the client, is the AI and technology purely a hygiene factor, expected by everybody, or will AI increasingly be managing the portfolios?

People with AI will be better than people without AI. I’ve listened to this discussion for almost 10 years, and five years ago it really started accelerating, and now you’re seeing the execution. You can’t really argue anymore about whether AI is going to be a disruptor or about the role technology will play in financial services.

The next challenge is how to invest in it. I came from a more traditional asset manager and if I spent $25m on AI, it was a lot of money. Now I work at a firm spending $4bn on technology each year. So it’s not that AI is going to be running portfolios for you, but it is now a tool that’s going to make you more efficient. The change we’ll be seeing in our industry for the next five years is going to be way more pronounced than what we saw in the previous 20.

So what will the leading asset and wealth manager look like in the next five years, as it emerges from this full-scale revolution?

It’s going to be one that is client obsessed. Traditional investment capabilities have become largely commoditised today. Are clients picking these firms because of returns or costs? Yes, but that’s just table stakes. The asset managers of tomorrow are going to be the ones that are more tech companies than anything else, accommodating digital assets and tokenisation. It will be about how we move money around, how we create liquidity and what flexibility we have.

Three years ago, Jose, your predecessors were not talking so much about technology, but focusing on importance of socially responsible investing to their client base. But ESG funds have fallen out of favour. The Texas pension funds, for example, with $300bn in assets, were banned from buying funds managed by BlackRock. And then in January, BlackRock drops out of the Net Zero Asset Managers climate change coalition, and they’re miraculously back on the buy-list. Is it inevitable that the type of assets, managed by houses such as yourselves, will be determined partially, at least, by the political agenda?

A lot of what you’ve seen with ESG is about language. Many years ago I was asked if this ESG thing is real — are people really buying it? Is this kind of thing going to be part of our markets? And I would always say: it becomes real when the politicians show up and the regulators show up, because the way our markets work, when money is really in motion, you’re going to get everybody’s attention.

That’s when you know it’s arrived and that is what you’re seeing now. The risks inherent with climate change will not go away and those companies managing money need to manage those risks. That’s what they do for a living. What’s not going to change is that your stakeholders, your clients, your employees, are going to care about this. So yes, this is what progress looks like, because it does mean more transparency, it does mean more process and understanding and things that you can repeat. But a lot of what you’re seeing today changing is just language.

And what do you expect leadership to look like in 2030? There’s a lot of debate in the investment world: should the leaders be decisive and aggressive, like some we’ve seen on this stage in the past, or empathetic, kind and steady? Your former colleagues tell me how you never panic in a crisis and always think about values and connecting with your staff. Do some leaders, in your view, forget these qualities?

I’ve had the opportunity to invest through different cycles and 80 per cent of the stuff out there is outside your control. The first thing in leadership is to step back and say: let’s not focus on things we cannot control and what the Fed’s going to do. We can’t control which country is going to invade another country, but we can control what we do in managing our own process. We can control how we engage and talk to our clients.

From a values perspective, we must ask: what is asset management and financial services becoming? It’s a more global world, where we touch more people. Back before, you could be hiding in a closet, making good investments, and that was enough. But today’s business is about people and how we engage. Every job I’ve had, in every role that I’ve stepped into, people have asked me: what are you most concerned about — is it market volatility?

But my immediate concern when joining BNY was winning the trust of people. They need a purpose for being where they are and for what they do. The human and tech worlds are colliding, so the leaders are thinking about: how do we attract talent and does the talent want to be here? I think it’s only going get more competitive. And to me, the leadership is about empathy and driving trust in your folks.

We’ve looked into the future, so can we take this opportunity to look back to 2007? When the Bank of New York merged with Mellon Financial Corporation, my colleagues and I in the financial journalism community loved this huge story, which we called the ‘Bony M’ merger, in tribute to the great Caribbean music group of the 1980s. If we look back at songs to define the main challenge we face today, which numbers should we chose?

My song would be ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones. The whole song is from the perspective of the devil introducing himself, playing a part in all these different moments in time. I had an old boss, whom I was sitting next to on a recent flight. I said to him: ‘This is such a unique time in the world order. I can’t believe that we’re living through this.’ And he’s like: “What are you talking about? Let me tell you about the 1960s!’ When we look at these different moments in time, we see the worst parts of humankind and it can feel desperate. But you look back and see that the world’s gotten through this so many times over and over again. We often forget what the second world war was like and what human beings can actually do, left to their own devices.

You can look at today’s world and feel pessimistic. But I feel tremendous optimism, because the will is there. I think at the end of the day, humankind comes together and we course correct. There’s a lot of craziness playing out in the world, but I don’t know that it’s any crazier than it’s been in previous generations. I still feel a lot of optimism that I can help and contribute to leave a better world for my two young daughters.