Clearstream
Piotr Sokol
18 Mar 2026
Piotr Sokol, head of Network Eurobonds and vice president at Clearstream, describes how a curiosity to understand the core infrastructure underlining the financial system drove him to pursue a role where markets, regulation, relationships and strategy all met in one place
Image: Clearstream
Can you give us an insight into your personal journey into the asset services industry? Why did you decide this was the career for you?
I started my career in a client-facing role at a retail bank. This experience gave me something I still carry every day: understanding the client’s perspective is the baseline of this job. Working at the front of the business made me curious about the mechanics behind it. That curiosity led me into operational roles at major Swiss banks. The more I learned about how the pieces fit together, the more I wanted to be part of the infrastructure.
That brought me to Network Management at Clearstream, Deutsche Börse Group’s post-trade business. It is a role where markets, regulation, relationships and strategy all meet in one place. My recent promotion to head of network Eurobonds puts me at the heart of Clearstream’s foundational business. Being part of shaping its future is exactly where I want to be.
What aspects of your job do you enjoy most?
I am responsible for the network management for the Eurobonds market, also called the international market, which establishes and maintains the network of agent banks that provides the issuance, safekeeping, reconciliation, and asset servicing for securities of different asset classes, allowing this single, international market to function across many different jurisdictions and currencies. What keeps the role interesting is that no two markets behave the same way. Every jurisdiction has its own legal framework, its own market practices, its own political dynamics. The external dimension plays a huge part as well.
Representing Deutsche Börse Group in industry working groups and on the boards of market entities puts me in a position to do more than just react to how markets develop. I can actively contribute to shaping them on behalf of our clients. That kind of influence over market infrastructure is not something most roles offer.
Being fairly new to the industry, how does your experience compare to those who are more established? Are there pros and cons?
Experience in this industry is not linear. Someone who spent a decade in one area of focus has depth in a narrow band. Someone who’s moved across roles and institutions in a shorter time might have a broader range with less depth. Neither profile is automatically stronger.
Established professionals carry a context I respect enormously. They have the memory of how things have developed and might have gone wrong before, which is genuinely protective. What I bring at this stage of my career is an appetite to question things that more experienced people have learned to accept as a given.
The ideal setup is having someone who knows why a process is hard, sitting next to someone who does not realise they are supposed to find it impossible. That’s where the actual breakthroughs happen.
Have you noticed any misconceptions about the asset servicing industry?
Before working in this industry, I was on the other side of it, helping clients buy international securities with a very high-level understanding of what happened next. I assumed it was automated and fully digital. A role in operations showed me how wrong that assumption was. The chain between an investor and the asset they own is longer and more complex than one would normally think. I find that the most common misconception is simply that the system just works. It works because a lot of people make it work, every single day, and that is a very different thing.
Is there anything in the industry you would like to see evolve or change?
There is a massive gap right now between what modern technology can do and how the financial system actually operates. That gap exists because legacy systems and habits built up over decades are difficult to change when everything must keep running. It is like trying to renovate a building while people are still living inside it. You know exactly what needs to change and the transformation is happening, but it is very complex to sequence it. I want to see the industry treat that challenge as a core priority, rather than something to be worked around. The legislation is finally starting to enable these technological leaps. We all need to act on it.
What is the training process for a new employee? Was it beneficial to your role and those now in the same position?
The formal procedure gives you the theory and the regulatory baselines. But the most effective training for a network manager comes from direct, hands-on experience. Because the role is so cross-functional, you have to learn how to manage negotiations, operational due diligence and commercial strategy at the same time. Much of the role relies on judgment that can only be built through practice. With practice, you start to understand how the organisation thinks as a whole, not just from your corner of it. That broader perspective is what makes the difference when you are representing the firm to regulators, Central Securities Depositories and agent banks.
In terms of your career, where do you see yourself in a decade?
Ten years ago, the industry was settling on T+3, then we moved to T+2 and now T+1 is arriving. Issuance that used to require days and stacks of paper, today happens digitally. The honest answer is nobody can tell you precisely what the market will look like in another decade. The direction, though, is clear: tokenisation, DLT-based infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks catching up with the technology.
In 10 years, I want to be leading at a broader scale, and continue to do work that has real consequences for how those markets function. But I also want to have proven something I genuinely believe: entrepreneurship does not belong only to startups. Some of the most impactful work happens inside large, established organisations when someone has the conviction to identify an opportunity, build the case, and see it through to completion. I want to do that on a large scale and lead people who think the exact same way.
What advice would you give to young graduates entering the financial services field?
Communication, empathy and resilience are becoming rarer as more output in every profession starts to look and sound exactly the same. Having a difficult conversation with a counterpart, reading what is not being said in a meeting, and maintaining a relationship through a dispute without surrendering your commercial position – none of that can be automated.
Those skills will define careers in this industry far more than any technical qualification. Emotional intelligence is the real differentiator now and that gap is only going to widen. Be more human than the tools around you.
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