How to get a custody job in financial services

• Global custody jobs keep track of a client’s money, assets, and make sure that all activity that happens is universally recognized.
• Technology is changing custody and making it more proactive – using technology, and especially data manipulation, is now considered a paramount skill in global custody jobs.
• As custodians are expanding their activities and offering services such as risk and compliance to clients, more client-facing roles are developing.

A global custodian is a financial institution responsible for the safekeeping and reporting of their clients’ domestic and global financial assets. Historically, this meant the actual physical protection of stock and bond certificates, but today, the physical certificates have largely been replaced by electronic records. These electronic records need continuous management to ensure all dividend and interest payments are received. Both the client base and the range of assets that custodians deal with have also evolved in recent years.

Custodians’ client base has broadened from being traditional fund managers and the trading arms of investment banks to encompass hedge funds, alternative asset management firms, and the family offices of high-net worth individuals.

The assets which custodians look after have also expanded in range from cash and shares to derivatives, real estate and digital assets such as crypto currencies. The services provided by big global custodians – State Street, Northern Trust, BNY Mellon, JPMorgan, Citi and others – have evolved with the changing needs of their clients. As the custodian industry moves to a more digital footing, the big custodians are trying to provide extra services to clients beyond the core business of simply settling trades.

What extra services are these? Custodians were traditionally seen as providers of back-office solutions, and while that’s still the case, they have also moved towards the middle-office, offering services that go beyond settlement of transactions and into areas like regulatory performance measurement or compliance and risk monitoring.

The result is that jobs in custody today vary between data-driven processing and administration roles and more client-facing jobs where you will deal with the needs of clients.

Brian Allis, a Senior Vice President at State Street, told us a few years ago that “at its heart, securities services is a client facing industry. Client-facing roles in custody go beyond traditional sales, relationship management and client service. Roles in product, operations, network management and technology are often client-facing. The traditional role of custody provider has transformed over the last three decades from focusing on safekeeping to covering the entire investment life cycle.”

What jobs are there in financial custody?

When you work in custody you’ll be fundamentally working in operations, the engine room for processing client activities. Operations is generally considered to be part of the back office. Junior jobs in global custody have historically been very process-driven but that is changing, with the most repetitive tasks becoming automated.

“The main job of the custodian is to take away all of the administration and processing work that their fund management clients don’t want to do,” said James Manders, founder and managing director of CassonX, a leading recruitment firm for middle and back-office operations jobs.

Custody covers a broad range of activities, but jobs fall into three categories – trade life cycles, fund accounting, and administration and distribution processing.

Trade life cycle: These are the classic bread-and-butter roles in custody. They include jobs in trade settlement and confirmation, transaction reporting and asset servicing. Asset servicing covers corporate actions, which can include proxy processing, securities borrowing and lending and the transfer of shares related to corporate spin-offs or acquisitions. 

Fund accounting and administration: The core of global custody jobs focuses on the accounting and administration of client funds in key global custody centers such as Ireland and Luxembourg. Here, the custodian will ensure all income is received into the fund and that the net asset value (NAV) is correctly computed with the appropriate frequency, often daily. Global custodians may also be responsible for ensuring the smooth delivery of additional securities added to the fund and for reconciliations, making sure there are no discrepancies in trading.

Distribution processing: Distribution processing covers client servicing, performance production and client reporting. This area is the most client facing of all custody roles as it involves dealing with the day-to-day information needs of clients. With custodians now looking after the entire life cycle of an asset, Allis said that client service roles have expanded to match this increased solution set. “Staff in these functions now have an unprecedented opportunity to be involved in every stage of the investment life cycle throughout their career, if they have a curious mindset and an appetite for a steep learning curve,” he explained. “Once they have built their knowledge, they become a critical interface between the client and the provider.”

Prime services: For most large custodians, prime services will make up a significant proportion of the business. Prime services involves providing advice and assistance to hedge fund clients. Within prime services there will be business analysts, assisting the client and introducing appropriate securities services, all with the aim of improving profitability for the hedge fund.

How custody jobs are changing

Jobs in custody can also be split by functional area rather than high level job categories. These functional areas include client relationship management and sales (e.g. helping to prepare Requests For Proposal (RFP) for prospective clients), product development, delivery, and technology.

What’s increasingly common across each of these areas is data and technology. “Data collection, storage and analysis will become the basis for all future service offerings and business models,” Allis explained. “Technology is changing to support this paradigm shift, as a result investment service providers are increasingly becoming their clients’ investment data custodian. This requires client service staff to become familiar with the processes to source, curate, and analysis data across the entire investment cycle, including custody, for the benefit of their clients seeking operational alpha.”

This is having a big impact on custody jobs, and the skillsets custodians require. “The digitization of custody is enabling a far more focused view on value add and differentiated services that are dependent on people to execute. Staff need to be engaged in the end-to-end business process and move away from the traditional functionalized view of custody,” Allis added.

“Custody has continued to evolve into a technology-first business,” said Melíosa O’Caoimh, head of Northern Trust in Ireland. “As a result, our hiring practices and the talent we recruit has changed to keep pace with innovation. That innovation also requires us to consider graduates and talent from different backgrounds and offer career paths through the organization that may cross through a number of different related areas and even include an exchange program – for example to our India business, and vice versa.”

Data has become the tool by which custodians can offer higher value services to their clients, and that is redefining many jobs in the sector. “Roles are becoming increasing dependent on solution engineering and data analytics, being able to understand how to translate a clients operating model to a target state operating model and articulating the benefit of the transition is now at the heart of what we do,” Allis concluded.

Innovation in areas like cryptocurrency and blockchain, along with the automation and digitization of custody processes, is changing the landscape, O’Caoimh said. “This creates different career paths and opportunities for people across our organization, whether they are looking to expand a range of skills or specialize in a particular area. I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be part of a custodian and fund administrator – the pace of change has been accelerated through the pandemic and we continue to see evolutions in AI and machine learning enabling us to expand roles in other advancing areas.”

Clearing and settlements – which are the bread and butter of custody, much like operations – is one field particularly susceptible to new technology like blockchains. Clearing and settlements are the processes, after a transaction, of transferring the financial product that was bought or sold to its new owner. Both are being transformed by tokenization, which is at its core an ultra-efficient way of storing data, in which every asset that a bank deals with is turned into a “token” on a digital ledger. Instead of waiting for days for paperwork to clear between different institutions, everyone in a transaction looks at the same digital token on the same ledger. 

This ledger, which is online and standardized, is in in turn very easy to read, analyse, and manipulate by an AI agent. Some banks, such as Citi, are already doing this with tokenized assets such as Bitcoin, The Block reported earlier this year.

How is AI changing custody jobs?

Of all aspects of financial services, custody might be the most exposed to the development of AI. It has that in common with operations.

Unlike something like sales & trading or private equity, the work of custodians is not being changed by AI, but rather outright replaced by AI. That’s partly related to the nature of the work – there is no selling being done by the custodian process, and things are very procedural. 

The impact of AI is also an impact on hiring. BNY Mellon, the largest custodian bank in the world cut its intern class from 1,700 to 1,500 between 2024 and 2025. In 2026, it said on Instagram that it had “1,100+” energetic minds in its summer internship.

Despite that, BNY CEO Robin Vince told Bloomberg earlier this year that he was an “AI optimist” and noted that he had tripled the size of intern & analyst classes since starting his tenure as CEO in 2022. “There’s a lot of doom-mongering around AI, and I understand, none of us know how the world is going to unfold,” Vince told Bloomberg. “For sure, it’s going to make some roles unnecessary.”

Luckily, like in other sectors, surviving interns will be well-placed to enjoy their careers. BNY is training the interns that remain on its homegrown AI, called Eliza, as well as offering courses in its “AI University”. It’s been an partner of OpenAI since late 2022, when ChatGPT was launched.

Eliza does a variety of things using OpenAI’s models and BNY’s data, most importantly building agents for BNY to use – for example, it created a “contract review assistant” that reduced the time that the firm spent reviewing legal documents by 75%, across 3,000 vendor agreements a year. BNY estimated that it saved approximately 9,000 hours with this tool, and at standard compliance pay ($76 per hour, according to our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report), that comes to $684k in annual savings.

Annual savings aren’t just financial. They also mean that employees have less to do – which implies something obvious. State Street said in its Q2 2026 investor call that headcount was down by 3%, “consistent” with the firm’s focus on “productivity and disciplined resource allocation.”

The scale of change is, and will be, monumental. The firm said that it intended to spend around $500m on severance alone by 2029, with a benefit of around $1bn. “We think that's a highly attractive ROI on that severance cost,” State Street CFO John Woods said. He also noted that investment services – the area of the business that provides asset custodianship services – has a “a higher opportunity for improvement” than its investment management or markets businesses, which are more involved in asset management and financing, respectively.

What to expect in custody when you start as a graduate

If you start your career in custody as a graduate trainee, you may find yourself on a “rotational training program.” These allow graduates to gain experience in a number of different areas over a four- or five-year period and then specialize later on.

Additionally, candidates with technical skills and experience in global custody are highly sought after, as are those with subject material expertise (SME) in individual products such as derivatives.

Northern Trust recruits candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds, including business and accounting, but also areas such as engineering, hospitality or retail. “Successful candidates are usually positive, resilient, with attention to detail who are open to continuing their professional development with Northern Trust through the various in-house training and support networks provided,” added O’Caoimh.

Career progression in the custody industry

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

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 with roles such as a client operations specialist.

As a VP, you’ll work across different products and will prioritize each one based on client requirements, and as an MD 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.

Education and qualifications for custody jobs

Read More: The qualifications you need to work in banking, trading, and more

Like with operations roles, no degree is strictly needed for a career in compliance, but it probably won’t hurt to have a finance or business-related background. An analysis of State Street's custody analysts showed us a variety of degrees, with finance and law probably the most represented, although not by much.

Like bank operations, custody has limited external qualifications associated with it. The Investment Operations Certificate (IOC) from CISI might be useful here, but once again, that’s mostly in the UK. There’s also the Diploma in Investment Operations (DIO), from the same organization.

Pay in global custody jobs

Custody does not pay as well as other fields of finance. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest global custodian, paid its 108 London staff £181k ($246k) on average in 2025, when it disclosed accounts for BNY Mellon Investment Management EMEA Limited, a subsidiary. It paid £195k ($265k) in 2024.

By contrast, a major investment bank like Goldman Sachs paid $963k (£709k) in the city in 2025. A major asset management firm like BlackRock paid its London staff an average of £219k ($297k) each in 2025. A major hedge fund like Citadel paid an average of $500k to $21m to its people in 2024, depending on which subsidiary you worked for.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.