From operations to influence
18 Mar 2026
As automation and digital infrastructure reshape the custody sector, Zarah Choudhary examines how women’s influence is expanding from the processing floor to the strategic direction of the industry
Image: bullrun/stock.adobe.com
Beneath global markets sits the infrastructure that ensures assets are safeguarded and trades settle efficiently. Custody services occupy this quiet centre of the financial system — managing the safekeeping of assets, the processing of transactions, and the complex operational frameworks that underpin modern capital markets.
For much of its history, custody was defined by operational intensity rather than technological sophistication. Long before automation transformed post-trade services, settlement processes relied on large teams performing manual reconciliations, confirming transactions by fax or telex, and managing corporate actions through painstaking administrative work.
Women played a central role in this operational environment. Yet while they formed the backbone of custody processing, their influence in shaping the systems and infrastructure of the industry often remained less visible.
Today, the custody sector is undergoing another period of transformation. Automation, faster settlement cycles, AI, and the emergence of digital assets are reshaping how institutions operate. As the industry evolves, the expertise developed in its operational foundations — much of it built by women — is increasingly informing how the next generation of custody services is designed.
The manual backbone of custody
In the 1980s and 1990s, custody operations were defined by manual processing and labour-intensive workflows. Physical share certificates, telex confirmations, and lengthy settlement timelines were common features of the post-trade landscape.
According to research in the sector, the environment was often operationally fragile.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, physical certificates, telex confirmations, and chronic settlement fails created daily risk and inefficiency,” notes Dr Ruth Wandhöfer, head of European markets at Blackwired.
At the time, settlement cycles were significantly longer than they are today. Markets gradually moved from T+5 settlement to T+3, and eventually T+2, reflecting growing pressure to reduce counterparty and operational risk. These changes coincided with the rapid expansion of global custody networks, as international asset managers increasingly required banks capable of servicing investments across multiple jurisdictions.
As transaction volumes increased through the 1990s, large custody institutions began building international operations hubs, relocating parts of the operational workflow to centres in locations such as Ireland, India, and Poland. These shared-service models allowed banks to scale operational capacity while maintaining near-continuous processing capability across time zones.
Within these environments, women were heavily represented in operational and middle office functions. Their contribution was central to the industry’s evolution. Mori Momeni, head of product at BCB Group, notes that women working in these areas were central to modernising the custody environment, helping drive improvements in reconciliation automation, messaging standards, and settlement discipline across global custody institutions.
“For many years, critical financial workflows have depended heavily on manual processes; spreadsheets, email chains, and fragmented reconciliations often supported by individual expertise rather than integrated systems,” Momeni says. “The industry’s transformation today is about rebuilding the operational backbone so processes can run end-to-end with minimal human intervention.”
This operational expertise became the foundation upon which much of the industry’s modern infrastructure would later be built.
Automation reshapes the operations floor
The gradual automation of custody processes transformed the industry’s operating model. Initiatives such as straight-through processing (STP), messaging standardisation, and settlement cycle compression steadily reduced reliance on manual workflows. Momeni says that “at the centre of this shift is straight-through processing, where structured data moves seamlessly across interconnected systems without repeated manual re-entry,” adding that controls once applied retrospectively “are increasingly embedded directly into workflows through automated validations, permissions, and exception management.”
Reflecting on how dramatically the operational landscape has changed, Yvonne Swainston, head of operations change, investor services and billing operations at Citi, says the early years of her career were defined by highly manual workflows.
“There was a time when our operations were anchored in manual processes, primarily relying on VDIs for raw data input and capture on cobalt mainframes,” she explains. “Trading tickets were physical documents, necessitating meticulous, labour-intensive workflows.”
Swainston notes that the industry has since evolved into a far more technology-driven environment. “Fast forward to today, and we proudly stand as a diverse, technology-driven industry, richer in perspective and capability,” she says, pointing to innovations such as Citi’s Single Event Processing technology, which delivers corporate action information within minutes and significantly accelerates payment timeliness.
Camille Papillard, deputy head of financial intermediaries and corporate client line at BNP Paribas Securities’ Services, explains that the transformation did not occur overnight.
“In reality, the transition happened in layers: standards first, then data/control industrialisation, then digital channels, then targeted automation,” she says.
Industry initiatives such as Target2-Securities (T2S), the Corporate Action Joint Working Group, and ISO 20022 messaging standards helped establish a more consistent framework for processing corporate actions and shareholder communications.
Processes that once required teams manually matching instructions line by line gradually became systems capable of near-real-time servicing and automated confirmations.
For operational teams, this technological shift fundamentally altered day-to-day work.
“Operational roles have shifted from ‘doing the transaction’ to managing exceptions, owning processes, and continuously improving STP,” Papillard explains.
Instead of manually chasing instructions and reconciling accounts, teams increasingly focus on monitoring systems, analysing break patterns and strengthening control frameworks.
Automation also coincided with growing cost pressures across the financial sector, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Custodian banks began investing in workflow platforms, shared services models and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure to manage rising transaction volumes while maintaining operational resilience.
The globalisation of custody operations
The modern custody industry has also become increasingly globalised as banks expanded operational centres across multiple jurisdictions.
Shared service models and cross-border teams enabled institutions to manage rising transaction volumes while maintaining service continuity across time zones.
At the same time, regulatory reforms following the global financial crisis introduced new requirements for transparency, collateralisation, and operational oversight.
Wandhöfer reflects on this period as a turning point in the industry’s evolution.
“The post-financial crisis period introduced a new regulatory intensity, mandating greater collateralisation, central clearing and operational resilience,” she explains.
These reforms accelerated digitisation across custody operations, and encouraged institutions to adopt new standards, infrastructure, and data frameworks.
Women played an active role in this transition, contributing to the development of messaging frameworks, operational resilience structures, and emerging digital custody models.
According to Wandhöfer, women have helped advance ISO 20022 adoption, strengthen settlement resilience frameworks, and shape commercial models for digital custody services.
Helen Adair, chief product officer at Taskize, says: “Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen post-trade operations evolve from manual, people-led processes toward far greater automation and connectivity. However, the pressure points often remain where humans and systems meet.”
“The move to T+1 puts legacy workflows under real strain, highlighting that efficiency now depends on seamless digital interaction between investment managers, custodians, and service providers,” Adair adds.
“Practical innovations like API-driven data access and smart collaboration tools are now defining what modern custody expertise looks like. It’s agile, transparent, and built on real-time information flow.”
Leadership and influence: Shaping the next generation of custody
As custody operations have evolved, so has the role of operational expertise within financial institutions. What was once considered purely a processing function is increasingly recognised as a strategic capability.
Emily Schlosser, head of custody client platform at BNY, describes this transformation as a shift in how the industry defines custody itself. “Custody has transformed alongside exponential market growth and technological advancement,” she says. “What began as a processing function is now a strategic capability centred on resilience, data, and innovation.”
This shift has also reshaped leadership roles across custody organisations.
“Leadership has evolved from centralised decision-making to providing clarity of mission and empowerment to teams in fast-moving, complex environments,” Schlosser notes.
Schlosser adds that, “automation, particularly through generative AI, and digital infrastructure are fundamentally transforming our industry in ways we could not have imagined even a few years ago,” and says this shift “requires a heightened need for stronger infrastructure, connectivity, data, and controls.”
Papillard similarly observes that many professionals — particularly women who began their careers in operational roles — have transitioned into transformation and governance leadership positions. “As custody evolved from ‘processing’ to ‘engineering outcomes’, many women moved from execution roles into process ownership and transformation leadership,” she says.
Increasingly, these leadership roles extend beyond operational oversight into areas such as data governance, digital transformation, and model risk control. As custodians adopt advanced analytics, automation, and algorithm-driven workflows, senior leaders are responsible not only for implementing technology but also ensuring that new systems operate within robust regulatory and risk frameworks.
This governance dimension is becoming increasingly important. In highly automated environments, institutions must balance innovation with operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and ethical oversight of algorithmic decision-making.
Persistent gaps in representation
Despite these advances, gender representation at senior levels of financial services remains uneven.
Industry research suggests that while women now make up a significant portion of the financial services workforce, their representation in senior leadership roles remains comparatively low.
Eugenia Mykuliak, founder and executive director at B2PRIME Group, says: “For women, the problem of ‘first risk’ allocations comes down to the fact that they often get fewer opportunities on the whole. People are naturally more inclined to trust their money to proven professionals, and until a manager is given real capital and real accountability, they are generally viewed as untested.”
“That first allocation is where the real track record begins,” Mykuliak adds, arguing that “because finances and asset management have historically been male-dominated fields, even today, many decision-makers are prone to automatically giving those first opportunities to men.”
Aidana Zhakupbekova, chief financial officer at Rydoo, highlights the scale of the gap.
“While progress is slowly being made, the fact remains that women are still significantly underrepresented at senior levels in finance,” she says.
“Globally, women make up roughly 47 per cent of entry-level finance roles, yet only around 14 per cent hold C-suite level positions.”
Across European banking institutions, similar patterns emerge. Women hold a growing share of board seats, yet representation within executive committees remains significantly lower.
These structural gaps highlight the ongoing challenge of translating workforce participation into leadership representation within financial markets.
The evolving skills of custody
As custody continues to evolve, the skills required to operate within the industry are also changing. Operational knowledge remains essential, but it is increasingly complemented by technological fluency, data expertise, and strategic thinking.
Papillard describes modern custody expertise as a hybrid discipline combining operational mechanics with digital capability.
“Modern custody expertise is now a hybrid of market mechanics, data literacy, digital connectivity, and change delivery,” she explains.
The complexity of global markets means professionals must now understand how regulatory standards, data architectures and digital infrastructure intersect across the investment lifecycle.
For Schlosser, the defining characteristic of future custody professionals will be adaptability.
“What defines a modern custody enterprise for me is the willingness to continuously learn, adapt, and evolve,” she says.
Momeni says the next phase of transformation “will not be defined by the blanket adoption of AI, but by its targeted integration into operational decision-making,” with systems increasingly supporting judgment by “synthesising large volumes of information and presenting a structured view of the situation, allowing human operators to focus on judgement, oversight, and complex exceptions.”
Leo Labeis, CEO and founder of REGnosys, adds: “With thousands of digital roles going unfilled and the UK economy projected to miss out on more than £10 billion in growth under current trends, it’s vital that the technology sector steps up efforts to support women to enter, remain, and progress in the sector.”
As automation, faster settlement cycles, and digital asset markets reshape the industry, the ability to combine operational insight with technological fluency will become increasingly important.
For many observers, this transformation represents not just a technological shift but a cultural one — redefining how expertise is recognised within custody organisations.
And in an industry built on operational precision and resilience, the knowledge accumulated on the operations floor — where many women first built their careers — may prove to be one of the most valuable assets of all.
For much of its history, custody was defined by operational intensity rather than technological sophistication. Long before automation transformed post-trade services, settlement processes relied on large teams performing manual reconciliations, confirming transactions by fax or telex, and managing corporate actions through painstaking administrative work.
Women played a central role in this operational environment. Yet while they formed the backbone of custody processing, their influence in shaping the systems and infrastructure of the industry often remained less visible.
Today, the custody sector is undergoing another period of transformation. Automation, faster settlement cycles, AI, and the emergence of digital assets are reshaping how institutions operate. As the industry evolves, the expertise developed in its operational foundations — much of it built by women — is increasingly informing how the next generation of custody services is designed.
The manual backbone of custody
In the 1980s and 1990s, custody operations were defined by manual processing and labour-intensive workflows. Physical share certificates, telex confirmations, and lengthy settlement timelines were common features of the post-trade landscape.
According to research in the sector, the environment was often operationally fragile.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, physical certificates, telex confirmations, and chronic settlement fails created daily risk and inefficiency,” notes Dr Ruth Wandhöfer, head of European markets at Blackwired.
At the time, settlement cycles were significantly longer than they are today. Markets gradually moved from T+5 settlement to T+3, and eventually T+2, reflecting growing pressure to reduce counterparty and operational risk. These changes coincided with the rapid expansion of global custody networks, as international asset managers increasingly required banks capable of servicing investments across multiple jurisdictions.
As transaction volumes increased through the 1990s, large custody institutions began building international operations hubs, relocating parts of the operational workflow to centres in locations such as Ireland, India, and Poland. These shared-service models allowed banks to scale operational capacity while maintaining near-continuous processing capability across time zones.
Within these environments, women were heavily represented in operational and middle office functions. Their contribution was central to the industry’s evolution. Mori Momeni, head of product at BCB Group, notes that women working in these areas were central to modernising the custody environment, helping drive improvements in reconciliation automation, messaging standards, and settlement discipline across global custody institutions.
“For many years, critical financial workflows have depended heavily on manual processes; spreadsheets, email chains, and fragmented reconciliations often supported by individual expertise rather than integrated systems,” Momeni says. “The industry’s transformation today is about rebuilding the operational backbone so processes can run end-to-end with minimal human intervention.”
This operational expertise became the foundation upon which much of the industry’s modern infrastructure would later be built.
Automation reshapes the operations floor
The gradual automation of custody processes transformed the industry’s operating model. Initiatives such as straight-through processing (STP), messaging standardisation, and settlement cycle compression steadily reduced reliance on manual workflows. Momeni says that “at the centre of this shift is straight-through processing, where structured data moves seamlessly across interconnected systems without repeated manual re-entry,” adding that controls once applied retrospectively “are increasingly embedded directly into workflows through automated validations, permissions, and exception management.”
Reflecting on how dramatically the operational landscape has changed, Yvonne Swainston, head of operations change, investor services and billing operations at Citi, says the early years of her career were defined by highly manual workflows.
“There was a time when our operations were anchored in manual processes, primarily relying on VDIs for raw data input and capture on cobalt mainframes,” she explains. “Trading tickets were physical documents, necessitating meticulous, labour-intensive workflows.”
Swainston notes that the industry has since evolved into a far more technology-driven environment. “Fast forward to today, and we proudly stand as a diverse, technology-driven industry, richer in perspective and capability,” she says, pointing to innovations such as Citi’s Single Event Processing technology, which delivers corporate action information within minutes and significantly accelerates payment timeliness.
Camille Papillard, deputy head of financial intermediaries and corporate client line at BNP Paribas Securities’ Services, explains that the transformation did not occur overnight.
“In reality, the transition happened in layers: standards first, then data/control industrialisation, then digital channels, then targeted automation,” she says.
Industry initiatives such as Target2-Securities (T2S), the Corporate Action Joint Working Group, and ISO 20022 messaging standards helped establish a more consistent framework for processing corporate actions and shareholder communications.
Processes that once required teams manually matching instructions line by line gradually became systems capable of near-real-time servicing and automated confirmations.
For operational teams, this technological shift fundamentally altered day-to-day work.
“Operational roles have shifted from ‘doing the transaction’ to managing exceptions, owning processes, and continuously improving STP,” Papillard explains.
Instead of manually chasing instructions and reconciling accounts, teams increasingly focus on monitoring systems, analysing break patterns and strengthening control frameworks.
Automation also coincided with growing cost pressures across the financial sector, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Custodian banks began investing in workflow platforms, shared services models and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure to manage rising transaction volumes while maintaining operational resilience.
The globalisation of custody operations
The modern custody industry has also become increasingly globalised as banks expanded operational centres across multiple jurisdictions.
Shared service models and cross-border teams enabled institutions to manage rising transaction volumes while maintaining service continuity across time zones.
At the same time, regulatory reforms following the global financial crisis introduced new requirements for transparency, collateralisation, and operational oversight.
Wandhöfer reflects on this period as a turning point in the industry’s evolution.
“The post-financial crisis period introduced a new regulatory intensity, mandating greater collateralisation, central clearing and operational resilience,” she explains.
These reforms accelerated digitisation across custody operations, and encouraged institutions to adopt new standards, infrastructure, and data frameworks.
Women played an active role in this transition, contributing to the development of messaging frameworks, operational resilience structures, and emerging digital custody models.
According to Wandhöfer, women have helped advance ISO 20022 adoption, strengthen settlement resilience frameworks, and shape commercial models for digital custody services.
Helen Adair, chief product officer at Taskize, says: “Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen post-trade operations evolve from manual, people-led processes toward far greater automation and connectivity. However, the pressure points often remain where humans and systems meet.”
“The move to T+1 puts legacy workflows under real strain, highlighting that efficiency now depends on seamless digital interaction between investment managers, custodians, and service providers,” Adair adds.
“Practical innovations like API-driven data access and smart collaboration tools are now defining what modern custody expertise looks like. It’s agile, transparent, and built on real-time information flow.”
Leadership and influence: Shaping the next generation of custody
As custody operations have evolved, so has the role of operational expertise within financial institutions. What was once considered purely a processing function is increasingly recognised as a strategic capability.
Emily Schlosser, head of custody client platform at BNY, describes this transformation as a shift in how the industry defines custody itself. “Custody has transformed alongside exponential market growth and technological advancement,” she says. “What began as a processing function is now a strategic capability centred on resilience, data, and innovation.”
This shift has also reshaped leadership roles across custody organisations.
“Leadership has evolved from centralised decision-making to providing clarity of mission and empowerment to teams in fast-moving, complex environments,” Schlosser notes.
Schlosser adds that, “automation, particularly through generative AI, and digital infrastructure are fundamentally transforming our industry in ways we could not have imagined even a few years ago,” and says this shift “requires a heightened need for stronger infrastructure, connectivity, data, and controls.”
Papillard similarly observes that many professionals — particularly women who began their careers in operational roles — have transitioned into transformation and governance leadership positions. “As custody evolved from ‘processing’ to ‘engineering outcomes’, many women moved from execution roles into process ownership and transformation leadership,” she says.
Increasingly, these leadership roles extend beyond operational oversight into areas such as data governance, digital transformation, and model risk control. As custodians adopt advanced analytics, automation, and algorithm-driven workflows, senior leaders are responsible not only for implementing technology but also ensuring that new systems operate within robust regulatory and risk frameworks.
This governance dimension is becoming increasingly important. In highly automated environments, institutions must balance innovation with operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and ethical oversight of algorithmic decision-making.
Persistent gaps in representation
Despite these advances, gender representation at senior levels of financial services remains uneven.
Industry research suggests that while women now make up a significant portion of the financial services workforce, their representation in senior leadership roles remains comparatively low.
Eugenia Mykuliak, founder and executive director at B2PRIME Group, says: “For women, the problem of ‘first risk’ allocations comes down to the fact that they often get fewer opportunities on the whole. People are naturally more inclined to trust their money to proven professionals, and until a manager is given real capital and real accountability, they are generally viewed as untested.”
“That first allocation is where the real track record begins,” Mykuliak adds, arguing that “because finances and asset management have historically been male-dominated fields, even today, many decision-makers are prone to automatically giving those first opportunities to men.”
Aidana Zhakupbekova, chief financial officer at Rydoo, highlights the scale of the gap.
“While progress is slowly being made, the fact remains that women are still significantly underrepresented at senior levels in finance,” she says.
“Globally, women make up roughly 47 per cent of entry-level finance roles, yet only around 14 per cent hold C-suite level positions.”
Across European banking institutions, similar patterns emerge. Women hold a growing share of board seats, yet representation within executive committees remains significantly lower.
These structural gaps highlight the ongoing challenge of translating workforce participation into leadership representation within financial markets.
The evolving skills of custody
As custody continues to evolve, the skills required to operate within the industry are also changing. Operational knowledge remains essential, but it is increasingly complemented by technological fluency, data expertise, and strategic thinking.
Papillard describes modern custody expertise as a hybrid discipline combining operational mechanics with digital capability.
“Modern custody expertise is now a hybrid of market mechanics, data literacy, digital connectivity, and change delivery,” she explains.
The complexity of global markets means professionals must now understand how regulatory standards, data architectures and digital infrastructure intersect across the investment lifecycle.
For Schlosser, the defining characteristic of future custody professionals will be adaptability.
“What defines a modern custody enterprise for me is the willingness to continuously learn, adapt, and evolve,” she says.
Momeni says the next phase of transformation “will not be defined by the blanket adoption of AI, but by its targeted integration into operational decision-making,” with systems increasingly supporting judgment by “synthesising large volumes of information and presenting a structured view of the situation, allowing human operators to focus on judgement, oversight, and complex exceptions.”
Leo Labeis, CEO and founder of REGnosys, adds: “With thousands of digital roles going unfilled and the UK economy projected to miss out on more than £10 billion in growth under current trends, it’s vital that the technology sector steps up efforts to support women to enter, remain, and progress in the sector.”
As automation, faster settlement cycles, and digital asset markets reshape the industry, the ability to combine operational insight with technological fluency will become increasingly important.
For many observers, this transformation represents not just a technological shift but a cultural one — redefining how expertise is recognised within custody organisations.
And in an industry built on operational precision and resilience, the knowledge accumulated on the operations floor — where many women first built their careers — may prove to be one of the most valuable assets of all.
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