Career paths in global custody

If you work in global custody, you can either specialize in one of four functional areas (client relationship management and sales, product development, delivery, technology) and build your career in this particular channel. Or you can start out a delivery role and swap into product development, for example.

If you start your career in custody as a graduate trainees, you may find yourself on a 'rotational training program.' In this case, you will be given the opportunity to work in different jobs at the start of your career, and then specialize later on.

Junior jobs in global custody have historically been very process-driven. However, this is changing as the most repetitive and boring tasks become automated! Nowadays, if you work in corporate actions, you might start out as a corporate actions analyst, processing and monitoring corporate events. From there, you could become a corporate actions supervisor before moving into a product development role helping with corporate actions solutions. Ultimately, you could move into a senior client relationship and sales job.

Like banks, global custodians often use the job titles of analyst, associate, vice president (VP) and managing director (MD) to signify different levels in the hierarchy.

If you have a product-related job in global custody, Lefevre says you'll start out as an analyst looking at ways of creating solutions for products "from a technical perspective." As an associate, you'll have a broader remit and will look at the solution in terms of market practice and servicing the client. As a vice president, you'll work across different products and will prioritize each one based on client requirements. And as a managing director you'll be responsible for making sure a solution gets implemented by working with all different parts of the business to coordinate the product's development and launch.