Sharde McCorkle, director at Sionic, reflects on her career so far, the industry’s DEI progress and what is on the horizon for asset servicing
At last year’s Asset Servicing Times Industry Excellence Awards, Sionic’s Sharde McCorkle was named the industry’s ‘Rising Star’. Her nominators called her “a next generation leader with a mindset to serve and a vision to succeed,” and her career so far has certainly shown her to be a formidable force in the asset servicing world.
Breaking into the industry in human resources, McCorkle has since worked in customer service, retail operations and corporate actions roles.
“These were all a necessary part of my career journey,” she says. “I was always equipped with motivation and the desire to learn, but each transition gave me a different lesson in experience, professionalism and presence.”
“I never set out to do a particular thing. There was always someone who gave me an opportunity and took a chance on me, and I can look back now and say that these roles were all a necessary part of my career journey.”
The importance of inclusion
The importance of giving people opportunities is at the top of McCorkle’s agenda; she has been an active member of several initiatives pushing for racial and gender equality in the industry. She has participated in employee resource groups, even when she herself was not a member of the group in question: “They were an opportunity to learn, understand and connect with people outside of my normal element,” she explains.
Awareness and consideration of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) “is important to me because it is a direct part of my identity,” McCorkle states. “I am a Black woman, so whether or not I speak up, whether or not I choose to educate myself on what we can do better in the workplace, I will be impacted.”
After spending more than 15 years in the industry, McCorkle has certainly seen some positive change — but there is still a long way to go, she affirms. “Gender and racial progress are slow and fragile, and can easily be lost if we don’t maintain the momentum,” she warns. “I do see a more diverse workforce than when my career began, but now we must implement real change.
“Hitting the equality and inclusion marks can be challenging, because we cannot always visibly see them. To meet these goals there are a few things the industry will need to consider to recover from the effects of the old culture while simultaneously constructing a new one.”
Putting a plan in place
McCorkle has a plan in mind to improve the industry’s DEI credentials. Conveniently alliterative, these are: action, accountability, awareness, acceptance and alignment.
“There must be a greater commitment to the actionable changes we hope to achieve,” she says of her first point, going on to emphasise the importance of transparency around companies’ progress on their goals: “without accountability, things are going to slip away again.” Awareness centres around McCorkle’s concept of being “consciously unbiased,” thinking about your actions and what might be driving them, rather than accepting that bias is unconscious and “trying to pay attention to the thing that you do not know you are doing.”
The industry has seen improvements in terms of awareness, but McCorkle believes that what is done with this awareness is the next question that firms need to be asking themselves. “There must be policy and systemic change” alongside a firm’s declarations of equality, she says. “Awareness cannot just stand alone.”
“We have to accept the truth of where we are, accept the truth of the mistakes that we have made along the way — and the fact that we will probably make more mistakes in the future,” McCorkle urges, on the topic of acceptance. Although it can be difficult to admit when things have gone wrong, it is vital that firms look at the reality of their current situations and acknowledge where they stand.
Change will succeed when it comes “from the top of the house, embedded in our overall strategies and supported the entire way down,” McCorkle says. Too often, communication is lost in middle management and engagement with an initiative suffers, she reflects. DEI goals are an executive agenda item and should be treated as such, she maintains, without being relegated to the bottom of the list.
Just keep going
There have been many comparisons made between the 2008 Financial Crisis and the current state of the global market. McCorkle began her career at DTCC in 2009, when shockwaves were still being acutely felt, and has advice for those entering the industry at a comparably turbulent time: “Just keep going. It seems simple in nature, but it is not anecdotal. It comes with work.”
“There was a time when I was really frustrated and overwhelmed at work, and I submitted my two weeks’ notice,” she recalls. “My boss did not accept it, and I am grateful that she cared enough to help me understand the decision that I was making. She gave me a book, which I still have, and a development exercise.”
After completing her reading and her exercise, McCorkle realised that she did not actually want to quit — she was frustrated and uncomfortable, ready to forfeit her career based on how she felt at a moment in time.
“Things did not miraculously get better when I decided to stay, but my perspective shifted,” she says. “I learned that the decisions I make today will carry the future me.”
McCorkle’s belief that you must seize the opportunities that are given to you has served her well throughout her career, and she is grateful that there was always someone who took a chance on her.
T+1 tactics
After a successful year for McCorkle, she and her team at Sionic are preparing for what comes next.
Although the implementation date for T+1 has not yet been confirmed, shortened settlement cycles have been in the back of the industry’s mind for a considerable time. McCorkle and her colleagues are getting ahead: “We are starting now. The T+1 transition needs to be given the attention it deserves from the very beginning.”
Preparing for T+1 has included a ‘trade lifecycle autopsy’, investigating what pieces of the process need to be changed and what elements of the T+3 to T+2 transition can be used to get to T+1. Through this, Sionic has “developed a framework for a programme that looks at everything across the post-trade lifecycle.”
To begin with, a client’s existing capabilities must be assessed, in terms of technology and people: “We should not be reinventing the wheel, but we should be taking the opportunity to make things better.”
“We then dive into readiness models, testing, migration and overall programme management, to ensure that we are dedicating the right level of resources to the overall initiative,” McCorkle elucidates.
She also highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration across the industry, in what will certainly be a challenging time for all market participants. “The industry has to take advantage of open forums and platforms that provide and solicit responses to questions and concerns. We will need to work together to coordinate a synchronised transition,” she says.
However, she adds that there could be added positives to the T+1 transition. “For a moment in time, everybody is going to be on the same page. I think people will be more willing to help each other out,” she predicts, suggesting that teams start looking at what else can be modernised during this time of transformation.
What’s next?
Taking everything that she has learned through her career so far, McCorkle is in the process of developing a new corporate actions training programme. Her decision to create this stems from the lack of guidance she received when she started out in the industry, and the frustration and feeling of being unsuited to the role that resulted from this.
“While there were knowledgeable people around me, no one ever really explained why I was doing the tasks I was assigned,” she explains. “I did not think I would ever fully understand what I was doing, and I felt like I was being put in a position to fail.”
Hoping to provide new industry entrants with the resources she needed at the start of her career, McCorkle’s programme will complement current training methods, such as shadowing, “by giving an in-depth understanding of all of the parts that make the whole.”
Outlining her main goals for the initiative, McCorkle states: “I want people to be able to articulate what, how and why they are doing what they are doing. The training allows for an exchange of questions and answers to create a well-rounded corporate actions team. People will be capable of doing more than just processing — I want teams to be able to make decisions, think critically about their roles in the event, detect risk early in the process and escalate the discussion.”
Because at the end of the day, “these are the people in the seats doing the job,” McCorkle says. “They need to be able to understand the reasoning behind the tasks they are completing, and they need to be able to offer their thoughts on how the systems work.”
This type of training “needs equal commitment from the people and the organisation,” she adds.
“They have to invest in each other. Training has always been something that we put on the back burner. Companies now have to make this an agenda item. While we are automating parts of the corporate actions process, shiny new systems without shiny new people and mindsets behind the desks do not add up.”
As the leader of Sionic’s asset servicing business, McCorkle is anticipating having to think quickly throughout the coming year. “Depending on the world around me, my priorities tend to shift,” she says, “but I do have some permanent priorities: my team, my clients’ growth, resilience, and organisation strength.”
Making connections is a feature of the job for McCorkle, whether those connections are with others in Sionic or with her clients. “In order for me to be able to deliver exceptional service to clients, I have to make sure that I have delivered that to the entire Sionic team.”
Returning to the importance of DEI, McCorkle plans to continue her own education and training so she can make sure that Sionic is doing its part to create “substantial footprints along the path to change. I believe in doing things from the inside out; I cannot ask clients whether they are considering their people if I have not done that myself.”
She adds that resilience is key, especially in light of the unknowns that the industry, and the world at large, continues to face: “Providing new thoughts, ideas, insights and specialisms to clients will contribute to my and the firm’s growth.”
Yet, the unknown is not necessarily unwelcome. “The unknown is always exciting for me,” McCorkle admits. “There is a healthy inquisitiveness that is unlocked when the unexpected occurs and we are compelled to think about things from another point of view.”
She looks back on events that have changed how the industry operated throughout her career: Hurricane Sandy, for example, damaging huge quantities of physical certificates in DTCC’s vault and accelerating the push for digitalisation.
“In this season of my career, the COVID-19 pandemic awoke us from a slumber,” she posits. “That is the thing that is going to dust off the cobwebs,” driving change as a ‘new normal’ is constructed.
One area that McCorkle is excited to watch in 2023 is technology. “New technology is on everybody’s radar, whether a firm has proprietary technology that they built themselves, or whether they’re soliciting a vendor or third party. We are looking for accuracy, timeliness, and how we can reduce risk and increase revenue.”
Following the pandemic and its restrictions on movement, “firms are still in the process of figuring out what a hybrid work environment looks like. The more automation that we can put in, the more we can eliminate risks, invest in our people, take on additional projects and build better and faster.”
Overall, she says, “I am excited to see what a shortened settlement cycle, robust processing engines, and a hybrid work environment will do for our industry in the next year.”
