Pershing’s recent workstation NETX360 is hailed as the iPhone of the financial technology industry, which can be accessed via smartphone. It has released NetX360 apps for the iPad as well. By the looks of the developments, in a year or two, there may even be a NetX360 App Store.

Technological innovations under way at Pershing (a subsidiary of BNY Mellon, the nation’s oldest continuously operating bank, and one of the world’s leading providers of securities services, which has approximately $831.3 billion in assets held in custody) today could propel the firm into a technology leadership role in both the broker-dealer and RIA custody spaces. Behind these break through changes which is impacting the industry is Suresh Kumar, its CIO. Versatility, sharpness and above all an intuitive power which comes from a deep sense of technology and the understanding of business, with which this CIO spearheads the technological ecosystem at Pershing is putting the pressure on competitors to try and meet or exceed what Pershing has to offer.

A keen observer of the technology spectrum, Kumar recognized that mobile computing is emerging as a viable alternative to how people conduct businesses. He says, “People are becoming more mobile and information and accessibility a click away or at finger tips is what people are tuning to these days. So we are taking advantage of that global platform, and have our main product available in iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Windows mobile”.

This edge which Kumar brings in to stay at the technology curve and to stay ahead of competition has helped Pershing in many ways. The of Sept. 11 hadn’t even happened yet, but Kumar, realized that his business-continuity efforts had to be more efficient. Though he had disaster recovery systems in place, what irked him was that it could be as long as 24 hours before things were back to normal. That was far too long for his liking, given that Pershing, provides global correspondent and prime-brokerage services to more than 750 institutional and retail-financial organizations, registered-investment advisors and managed-account programs. He engaged IBM to help with a major overhaul of its business continuity/disaster recovery capabilities.

Pershing had established two data centers and installed data mirroring and data replication. This effort needed a lot of investment and finally when the Sept 11 attack happened, Kumar’s long term vision proved right.