Peter Cherecwich, president of corporate and institutional services at Northern Trust, has won Global Custodian's Industry Person of the Year for North America 2017 following a live vote.
Cherecwich won in a close contest, marking a clean sweep for Northern Trust, having won the European equivalent of the award in March this year through Justin Chapman.
Over 8,000 votes were cast over the single day of voting.
Industry veteran Cherecwich has spent over a decade at Northern Trust, among a 25-year career in securities services.
During 2017, Cherecwich has been at the forefront of developments in arguably the most crucial part of a custodian bank’s long-term future – its disruptive technology advancements.
At a time where blockchain ideas and proof of concepts are most commonly talked about, Northern Trust announced in February that it had joined up with IBM in a commercial deployment of blockchain technology for the private equity market.
Both parties, along with other stakeholders, combined to build a distributed ledger offering based on the Hyperledger Fabric.
The development was timely and well needed given the lack of innovation in the private equity space, where investors are seeking greater transparency, security and efficiency.
“Current legal and administrative processes that support private equity are time consuming and expensive,” said Cherecwich at the time.
“A lack of transparency and efficient market practices leads to lengthy, duplicative and fragmented investment and administration processes.”
In an industry crying out for technological intervention Cherecwich and Northern Trust took the lead.
In August, Northern Trust also teamed up with an analytics firm to provide investors with a greater understanding of how to enhance returns from corporate actions.
The historical analytics provided by Scorpeo, through its ‘Harmonia’ technology generates reports detailing where investors may have missed out opportunities.
Elsewhere, Cherecwich’s win reflects the string of custody deals Northern Trust has secured over the year.