Steve David

 

Company

Northern Trust

 

Position

Managing Director & Country Head

​

MEETING THAT SHAPED A CAREER

​

Steve david’s professional development has been shaped by a handful of people, who influenced him at key stages of a career that has taken him from an audit trainee at price waterhouse to country head for northern trust in luxembourg.

 

It was during a FundForum conference in Monaco in 2001 that Steve David had an encounter that would shape his subsequent professional life: with Toby Glaysher (today Head of Global Fund Services International) and Steve Potter (most recently Vice Chairman of Northern Trust Corporation who retired last year after a distinguished career). David was so impressed that he said to himself that one day he would like to work for Northern Trust – and it wasn’t long before, in late 2003, Northern Trust decided to open an office in Luxembourg. David applied for a role and became Northern Trust’s second hire in the Grand Duchy, as Head of Risk and Control as well as Conducting Officer in the group’s Luxembourg Management Company. Now Country Head for Northern Trust in Luxembourg, David says he can see himself still working for the group a decade from now.

 

 

Learning experience

​

Born in Bettembourg, he studied economics and finance at the Institut Catholique des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Brussels, and in 1994 became an audit trainee at Price Waterhouse in Luxembourg. There David worked with another important influence on his career, John Parkhouse, and gained experience of the fund industry. After a couple of years with Chase Manhattan Bank Luxembourg, first in the Quality Control team and then in the Fund Compliance and Fiduciary area, he joined IKANO Advisory Management as Fund Compliance Officer. “It was important for my career because I was responsible for creating a function from scratch,” David says now, “helping me build a strong knowledge of the fund compliance world.”

​

​

Social dimension

 

He stepped up to become Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Northern Trust Luxembourg Management Company S.A. in 2009, then Country Head in May 2012, leading the continued expansion of the group’s specialist fund servicing and custody operation. This includes Northern Trust’s strengthened fund servicing capability further to the acquisition of UBS Asset Management’s fund services business in Luxembourg and Switzerland in 2017. This has established Northern Trust as a top 10 asset servicing provider in Luxembourg in terms of assets under administration and builds on the skills and expertise of its long-standing, highly regarded local team.  David is also supporting the re-domiciliation of Northern Trust’s EU banking presence to Luxembourg. David is a self-confessed perfectionist (and impatient with it), traits well suited to the demands of the financial services industry, yet in another life he might have made a career in the social field. He says: “The people I respect are those who work with people – social workers, nurses, doctors and teachers – because people are at the heart of everything.”

 

 

Facts & Figures

 

• Birthday: 11/05/1971 

• Place of birth: Luxembourg

• Nationality: Luxembourgish

• Languages: Luxembourgish, German, French, English, glimpse of Spanish

• Hobbies: Sports, Art

 

My favourite

 

• Cities: Luxembourg, Paris, Tokyo (though I have never been there)

• Restaurants: Kamakura, Celadon, Oishi (Paris), Matsuhisa (Munich)

• Places: Munich, Paris, “Vieille-Ville” of Luxembourg

• Books: Tintin, Enki Bilal, Yasunari Kawabata, Charles Bukowski

• Music: Jazz-House, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen

• Artwork: Helmut Newton, Araki, Giraud, Joerg Doering