The Bank of New York is transferring 1,500 securities services operations executives beginning next month to a 229,000-square-foot facility in Brooklyn as part of the bank’s ongoing disaster recovery efforts, bank officials said this week, as reported in a story by Securities Industry News.
Those plans include the ability to accommodate an additional 750 staffers in the event of an emergency in any other bank facility, according to the SIN story.
The Brooklyn building, located above the Atlantic Avenue train station of the Long Island Rail Road, is within walking distance of the Metrotech Center, home to J.P. Morgan Chase’s securities processing facilities and the Securities Industry Automation Corp., which runs operations for the New York and American stock exchanges.
BNY’s 1,500 employees, the majority of whom are now located in the bank’s Wall Street, Barclays Street and Church Street facilities, will take up eight of the 14 floors, with another four dedicated to retail stores; the top two floors will remain empty. The entire relocation is expected to be completed in July, according to the story.
“We will be migrating global custody, securities operations, unit investment trust administration and mutual fund accounting personnel to the Brooklyn building,” said Jeff Kuhn, SVP of business continuity planning at BNY.
The 750 backup seats are hot-wired for voice and data, but not all the desks have phones or PCs, SIN reports.
“We will be storing a large number of PCs and phones on-site to deploy immediately, and the balance is available with quick-ship programs we have in place,” Kuhn said.
A consortium of Wall Street broker dealers and clearing banks, including BNY, are currently in the midst of formulating plans to launch a backup “virtual” bank to carry on settlements and clearance of securities in the event of another disaster, like that which obliterated much of the electrical infrastructure of the Wall Street area in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.