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Wall Street has lost another of its “Gilded Age” names, with the decision this week by Bank of New York Mellon to cut “Mellon” from its brand and simply go by BNY.
Mellon was founded in 1869 and emerged as one of the prominent brands in finance during the waning years of the 19th century, marked by massive expansion on the back of US industrialisation.* A scion of the family, Andrew Mellon, also served as US Treasury secretary in the run-up to the Great Depression.
“The Gilded Age names, they’ve been fading since the ‘60s,” said Gary Richardson, the former official historian of the Federal Reserve system.
The period gave rise to several families whose names are still prominent on Wall Street today: John Pierpont Morgan, whose surname is the foundation for both JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
The Warburg name, made famous by Paul Warburg’s role in the establishment of the Fed in 1913, is still a fixture on Wall Street through private equity firm Warburg Pincus, which was co-founded by his nephew. And the names of Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs live on through their eponymous firm.
But others, such as Kuhn, Loeb and, more recently, Lehman Brothers have faded from public consciousness. Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 in what was at the time the largest corporate bankruptcy, and what survived of it is now part of British bank Barclays.
Brokerage firm PaineWebber, whose “Thank You PaineWebber” slogan inspired a Saturday Night Live skit in 1982, had its brand phased out after UBS acquired it in 2000. PaineWebber had already subsumed another Gilded Age stalwart in securities firm Kidder, Peabody.
Bank of New York’s history stretches back further than Mellon’s — to 1784 when it was founded by Alexander Hamilton. With an office on Wall Street, it was the first stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Today it is the world’s largest custody bank, a role that makes it essential to global finance but also largely unseen.
It acquired Mellon in 2007. Its move this week to jettison the Mellon brand after 17 years followed a common practice on Wall Street, where brands are often joined only temporarily following mergers.* Kuhn Loeb shared top billing with Lehman Brothers for a time after the two merged in 1977 to form Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb, but the latter name was later dropped.
While the Mellon name may be fading from Wall Street, it will remain prominent in Pittsburgh where the company was headquartered and its name is affixed to Carnegie Mellon University, Mellon Square and Mellon Park.
Today, Forbes ranks the Mellon family as one of the richest in America with a net worth of about $14bn. Timothy Mellon has been a top Republican donor to Donald Trump and has also helped finance Robert F Kennedy Jr’s long-shot White House campaign.
“In terms of Gilded Age families in order of importance, I’d certainly place the Mellons in the top five,” said Charles Geisst, a financial historian and author of Wall Street: A History.
BNY, whose legal corporate parent name will remain The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, said the streamlined BNY brand was part of its effort to “improve familiarity with who we are and what we do”. Today it oversees nearly $50tn in assets as part of its custody, markets and wealth services businesses.
BNY plans to still use the Bank of New York Mellon name on signs in Pittsburgh. It will also keep the Mellon brand for its passive index funds business.
“This work was actually really grounded not just in the evolution of our business but also client feedback globally,” Natalie Sunderland, BNY’s global head of marketing, told the Financial Times. “BNY is shorthand for what we’re already known as, not a different name altogether.”
The rebrand also adds a more modern sheen to a company that at times has been viewed as being stuck in the past.
For years, the joke told around the Bank of New York was that, as its founder Hamilton went off to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, he told employees not to change anything until he got back.
*This story has been amended to correct the number of years since the merger and the date Mellon was founded
