When the Average Age Drops: Post-Trade Through Young Eyes

Post-trade has a reputation, and it's not entirely undeserved: For a long time, this has been an industry of older, seasoned professionals. For years, I was one of the very few young faces in the room. It makes me genuinely happy that, in our division, the average age is now dropping.

I've spent that time “marinating” in young professional circles: Young Tables at TNF, the SIBOS STAR Scholarship, panels on generational change and authenticity in the workplace, and more recently the chance to moderate a few of these conversations myself. Watching our own team get younger felt like too good an opportunity to let pass.

So, I asked five colleagues under 30, some who joined a few years ago, some who arrived only weeks ago, to share what brought them into post-trade, what surprised them most, and what they think our industry still needs to solve. I wanted to see how their view compares to mine, and to get a little inspired myself.

My own path here was not exactly planned. I found Prime Services almost by accident, through the Markets and Investment Banking Traineeship RBI offered to master's students, the same program that has since evolved into today's full CIB Traineeship. I remember being amazed by how much I hadn't known even existed in this industry. With every opportunity that followed, I wanted to make things matter, internally and externally. If you ask me what the biggest challenge in our industry is, I'd say it is the ageing of it, and the old-school thinking and risk aversion that can come with that. The good news: Young people can genuinely help shift this, because for this generation, mistakes are no longer something to avoid at all costs. They're what provokes progress.

Not everyone plans a career in post-trade; most of us seem to find it. Christoph, who supports our DACH clients, first encountered post-trade through a part-time role alongside his economics studies at WU (Wirtschaftsuniversität Vienna). What began as an unfamiliar area soon developed into a genuine interest in how capital markets function beyond trade execution.

“Many students interested in capital markets initially think of investment banking or trading. I soon realized, however, that post-trade is the backbone that enables these activities to function reliably,” Christoph says. “What I enjoy most is the human side of the business, getting to know clients and colleagues with different personalities and perspectives across DACH and CEE, and learning how their needs differ across markets.”

Ustyna, who joined our Business Architecture team just two months ago, took a more deliberate route in. As a digital economy student, she was specifically looking for a role that combined her academic background with hands-on experience, and wanted to understand how technology and data intersect with business processes in a large international organization. “The offer to join the team immediately stood out, as it offers exposure to both the business and technology sides of banking,” she says. “Working in Product and Business Architecture gives you the ability to look at a process from a broader perspective, and to understand how business requirements can be translated into practical solutions. For me, the most valuable part has been learning from experienced colleagues who are eager to share their knowledge, while also being trusted with meaningful tasks.”

For Iryna, who now covers our international clients, the scale of it all was the first shock. “What surprised me most was probably how invisible the scale of it is,” she explains. Securities settlement in Europe moves hundreds of billions of euros every single day, and almost nobody outside the industry could describe how a trade actually gets from execution to a client's account. The second surprise, she says, was how much local detail still matters: “Despite T2S and a common regulatory framework, each market has its own conventions, cut-off times, tax rules and infrastructure, and those are the details that ultimately decide whether something settles or fails. On the other hand, that's also an opportunity to add value for clients by knowing those differences.”

Miljana, who is passing the international coverage baton to Iryna after three years with us, was struck by how little post-trade features in university courses or everyday conversation, despite how critical it is once you're working with large institutional and corporate clients. “What I find most rewarding is working closely with clients, understanding their needs, resolving issues, and receiving that genuine 'thank you' when everything runs smoothly,” she says. Collaborating across regions and cultures, she adds, has taught her how much communication and solutions need to adapt to meet different expectations.

For Mark, five years into his time with us and now part of Market Intelligence and Sales Engineering, one experience stands out above the rest: joining RBI's AI Pioneer Program in the first half of 2024. As part of the bank's wider AI transformation journey, the program was looking for self-motivated colleagues to become ambassadors, building a network of change agents who could learn about and teach a technology that was already reshaping the industry. “The decision to join connected me with driven, like-minded individuals across RBI Group whom I wouldn't have met otherwise, and paved the way for many exciting AI and data science opportunities we are currently pursuing,” Mark says. “Contributing to such projects is the highlight of my working day, as we explore how AI, implemented responsibly within the frameworks of GDPR, the EU AI Act and RBI's Code of Conduct, can be used to improve client experience.”

Looking ahead, Miljana expects post-trade to move steadily toward real-time processing. Tokenization, which recently went live in production with DTCC and involved major players like BlackRock, JPMorgan and the NYSE, is set to increasingly shape post-trade strategy. But she's clear-eyed about the trade-offs: As the IMF has pointed out, instant settlement could remove the traditional buffers that help institutions manage risk, shifting that risk instead to platform controllers. “Banks that succeed may be those that actively manage risk and liquidity in real time and serve as trusted intermediaries between legacy batch-based systems and the emerging 24/7 tokenized environment,” she says, and for RBI, with its strong regional presence across CEE, she believes this shift could open real opportunities.

Christoph sees the automation of manual processes as one of the most important forces shaping the future of post-trade. “We are already exploring how AI can be used in our daily work, and I believe its importance will continue to grow,” he says. “The greatest value will come from applying it to the right processes while combining the technology with the practical knowledge and judgement of experienced professionals.” For him, automation should support professional judgement and create more time for analytical and client-focused work rather than attempt to replace human expertise.

Ustyna, watching this from the Business Architecture side, already sees where the biggest shift will land: data. “Post-trade involves large amounts of information from different sources, and AI can help identify patterns, inconsistencies, and make information easier to analyze,” she says. She's careful to frame this as a complement rather than a threat. Automation can take over repetitive, time-consuming activities and free people to focus on the tasks where human judgement matters most, she believes, “without fear that it will remove the need for people who understand the business behind the technology.”

Ask Miljana about the industry's biggest current challenge, and she'll point to something distinctly European: the move to T+1 settlement by October 2027. “In practice, T+1 doesn't really give you an extra day; it takes one away,” she says. Trade allocations, confirmations, FX funding and everything else that used to fit within two days now has to happen within one, across more than twenty markets, each with its own conventions, currencies and settlement infrastructure. “It's not really one big technology problem. It's more like 20+ markets all trying to cross the same finish line at the same time, while each is running its own version of the race,” she explains. “I don't think there's one solution a single bank can build. It feels more like something the whole industry needs to work through together, and it's genuinely exciting to see how this will evolve.”

Mark's view on AI fits neatly alongside that sense of shared responsibility. “We must, of course, avoid wielding AI as our only hammer and looking for nails to hit,” he cautions. Sometimes classical workflow automation is the better fit, especially for simpler tasks, but agentic AI can also open up possibilities beyond our current view of automation, ones we haven't fully mapped out yet. “We are fortunately guided by rigorous compliance and technical frameworks that ensure the right tools are chosen, and that AI is used responsibly and in line with regulatory requirements,” he adds. Used well, he believes, AI can free up time for more meaningful, personal client interaction rather than less.

When it comes to what the next generation of post-trade professionals will need, Miljana points to a mix of strong process knowledge and genuine curiosity about technology. “It's not enough to understand one part of the process anymore; you need to see how everything connects, from the trade all the way through to settlement, liquidity and risk,” she says. Adaptability matters just as much, given how quickly the industry is changing, and so do the softer skills: communication, attention to detail, and the ability to work across teams and markets. “Especially in Europe, where everything is so interconnected, being able to understand the bigger picture while still being precise in the details is a really valuable combination.”

Christoph frames the relationship between younger and experienced professionals as a two-way exchange rather than a generational handover. “Younger professionals can bring fresh perspectives, ask why things are done in a certain way and explore alternative solutions,” he says. “Experienced colleagues provide the market knowledge, client understanding and practical context needed to assess whether those ideas will work. Progress requires both perspectives. It is a team effort in which curiosity and experience complement each other.”

Iryna thinks the client-facing side of post-trade is the industry's best-kept secret. “Students associate securities services with operations, so it barely occurs to them that there's a sales and relationship function at all,” she says. What surprised her most was how much of the role is coordination across the entire bank: pulling together input from operations, network management, risk, compliance, legal and IT into one coherent answer for a client questionnaire, due diligence request, or RFP. “It might sound administrative, but that's the fastest way to understand how the whole business fits together,” she notes, pointing also to network management (which selects and oversees the sub-custodians and CSDs across the markets we serve) and product ownership (which sits between the business and IT, translating client needs into what actually gets built) as paths students rarely consider.

Christoph's advice to anyone considering a career in post-trade is to look beyond the most visible areas of capital markets. “Try to understand not only your own tasks, but also how trading, settlement, custody, asset servicing and client service are connected,” he says. “Look for opportunities to join client discussions or contribute to client-related work, ask experienced colleagues why established processes work as they do, and volunteer for automation or process-improvement projects. This is also the approach I try to follow in my own role. It helps you build technical knowledge while gradually developing a broader understanding of the business.”

Before joining Group Prime Services, Ustyna had barely any exposure to the post-trade side of banking herself, and she thinks that's exactly the problem. “Many students hear about other areas of the financial industry, but not many realize how many interesting career opportunities exist behind the transaction itself,” she says. Her suggestion is to bring post-trade into universities and early career programs in a more practical way: case studies, workshops, internships and student projects that show how a trade actually moves through its different stages, and how technology, data, operations, risk, and client management all connect. “That's much easier to understand than describing it through theoretical terminology,” she adds.

Just as important, she believes, is hearing directly from young professionals themselves. “For me, joining as a student, it was very inspirational to see so many young professionals who are passionate about what they do. It showed me that post-trade is not only about following established processes,” she says. “This is the side of banking that I think more young people should get the opportunity to see.”

What struck me most, putting these voices together, is how much overlap there is: different starting points, similar instincts. Curiosity about how the whole system connects. A pride in solving something invisible to almost everyone outside it. A sense that this generation isn't waiting to be handed the future; it's already helping build it, one T+1 deadline, one AI use case, one client conversation at a time.

Thank you to Christoph, Miljana, Iryna, Mark and Ustyna for being so generous with your reflections.

Each contributor was asked for one or two sentences that inspire them, or that they simply wanted to share.