BNY: America’s oldest bank, a fund hub in Luxembourg

BNY, the New York asset-servicing group and the oldest bank in the United States, runs its Luxembourg operations as a European platform for global custody and fund services.

The oldest bank in America

BNY was established in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, which makes it the oldest bank in the United States. Known for two centuries as the Bank of New York, it grew through a long series of acquisitions, including the global custody business it bought from J.P. Morgan in 1995, before merging with Mellon Financial in 2007 to form BNY Mellon. The group shortened its name to BNY in 2024. It is the corporate brand of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, listed in New York under the ticker BK, and ranks among the largest custodians on earth, with roughly 49 trillion dollars in assets under custody and administration. Where other banks chase deposits and loans, BNY makes its living safekeeping and servicing the assets of other institutions. The combined group looks after assets for many of the world’s largest investors, corporations, governments and central banks.

A fund hub in Gasperich

BNY opened in Luxembourg in the late 1990s, when it still traded as the Bank of New York, and the Grand Duchy has been one of its European fund-servicing centres ever since. From offices in the Gasperich district of Luxembourg City, its teams provide global custody and depositary banking, fund accounting and transfer agency, the full machinery that sits behind an investment fund. Depositary banking means safeguarding a fund’s assets and overseeing its compliance, while transfer agency keeps the register of who owns what. Together these services let asset managers worldwide domicile their products in Luxembourg, Europe’s largest fund centre, across every asset class from mainstream UCITS funds to alternatives such as private equity and real estate. Around the clock, its multilingual teams work with BNY colleagues in other time zones so that a fund’s books never close.

A platform plugged into New York

That round-the-clock model is the point. BNY uses its Luxembourg branch and subsidiaries as a strategic European platform, serving international clients whatever the domicile of their managers, their investments or their investors. The custody chain that begins in the Grand Duchy plugs straight into a global network anchored in New York, where the group also runs one of the world’s largest asset managers, BNY Investments, overseeing around 2 trillion dollars. The 2007 merger that formed the group bolted that custody backbone onto a major asset manager, and Luxembourg sits at the European end of the result, a modern hinge between European funds and American infrastructure.