Four shortlisted for Global Custodian 2026 industry award

Global Custodian has named Mark Austin, Phil Brown, Fiona McNally and Isabelle Delorme as the four finalists for its 2026 Industry Person of the Year award. The winner will be chosen by a live vote on May 14 at The Savoy in London during the Leaders in Custody Awards.

The final shortlist was selected from a longlist of 10 after several months of review. Judges evaluated candidates on work on key projects, mandate wins, organisational milestones, innovation, leadership impact, team development, advocacy and wider industry contributions through working groups and forums. The award, now in its 10th year, is presented three times a year; the London edition focuses on custody, market infrastructure and securities services technology.

Mark Austin is pensions and insurance executive for EMEA at Northern Trust. He leads the firm’s strategy for pension and insurance clients across the region and has overseen growth in the UK pensions market. Recent mandates include appointments from the £11 billion South Yorkshire Pensions Authority, Lancashire County Pension Fund and the government-backed Nest workplace pension. He served as chair of the Defined Contribution Investment Forum in 2024 after a vice-chair role in 2023 and has been involved in de-risking programmes, pension pooling initiatives and transitions to in-house asset management.

Phil Brown is a senior executive at Clearstream. Under his leadership Clearstream advanced its D7 digital issuance platform and worked on digitising the Eurobond market. Over the past 12 months the firm enabled the first use of offshore Chinese government bonds for initial margin segregation, completed its first tri-party repo in Taiwan, signed a collateral partnership in Saudi Arabia with EDAA, reached €1 trillion in collateral management outstandings and recorded 4 million digital issuances on D7. Brown has driven technology initiatives including AI-driven client servicing tools, sales automation on a cloud strategy and a memorandum of understanding with JASDEC to explore digital securities collaboration between Europe and Japan. He has served 13 years on the board of the International Securities Services Association.

Fiona McNally is managing director and global head of network management at BNY. She defines and executes the bank’s global network strategy and leads a worldwide team of market specialists. McNally manages relationships across BNY’s direct and sub-custodian network and represents the bank on user committees and advisory councils. She participates in industry bodies including Irish Funds, the International Securities Services Association and the European Central Bank’s AMI-SeCo initiative. Her experience covers leadership, product management, governance, regulation and operations within investment fund services.

Isabelle Delorme is global head of product strategy and innovation at Euroclear. She oversees product strategy for issuers, fund managers and government clients and has led digital transformation and post-trade initiatives. Delorme played a role in Euroclear’s work on digitising the Eurobond market with Clearstream, and she has driven tokenisation partnerships and collaborations with organisations including Banque de France and Citi. Her team launched a next-generation EasyFocus service using Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies, and Euroclear has run experiments on central bank digital currency use cases. Delorme joined Euroclear in 2019 as chief business officer of ESES, later became deputy CEO of ESES and moved into senior product leadership roles.

The winner will be announced after the live vote at the Leaders in Custody Awards on May 14. Last year’s winner was Margaret Harwood-Jones of Standard Chartered. Previous recipients have included senior leaders from JP Morgan, BNY, Northern Trust, Citi and Deutsche Bank.