August 21, 2023

Career journeys in tech at Northern Trust

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It takes courage, energy and know-how to drive and support innovation, and our recent 2023 BuiltIn Moxie award nominees (and award winner) demonstrate just that.  We’re using our strong and firm foundation to drive innovation across Northern Trust and these three women are key to that journey.

The BuiltIn Moxie Awards honor rising women in tech for their contributions — skills, leadership and accomplishments. This is for both their impact to their places of work, communities and the industry as a whole. The 2023 Moxie Awards celebrate women who are likely to ascend to the pinnacle of their careers in tech — and who are already on their way.

“Moxie” is defined as a combination of courage, determination, energy and know-how. When it comes to recognizing women in tech, these are the qualities worth celebrating.

Moxie nominees:

-          Work with outsized dedication, commitment or passion.

-          Exhibit exemplary expertise to drive forward their team and company.

-          Uplift or mentor other women to rise them up.

-          Overcome challenges with a solutions-first mindset, inspiring others to do the same.

Women are nominated for Moxie Awards by their colleagues and leaders and we’re thrilled to share our 2023 Moxie Award nominees:

Wenshu Yang: Associate Specialist, Data Analytics

Shagun Singh: Team Lead, Service Delivery - Client Facing Applications

Katie Connor: Portfolio Architect, Wealth Management Digital Services

Wenshu Yang, Associate Specialist, Data Analytics

Wenshu brings her extensive background and passion in Audit, Risk and Data Analytics, to create sustainable solutions.  In her role, Wenshu is at the forefront of delivery against Northern Trust's enterprise-wide digital transformation strategic priority. 

Wenshu’s team describes her as timely, proactive, and able to communicate effectively across tech and business disciplines. Her can-do attitude translates into more effective ways of working.

Expertise

Wenshu's expertise helps create solutions that are user-friendly and digestible and she helps non-tech savvy Northern Trust colleagues be more efficient.

In addition to exceptional delivery in her day-to-day role, Wenshu dedicates additional time to serve as a diversity, equity, and inclusion champion via her involvement in many working groups and enterprise wide special initiatives, including our Women in Leadership employee led business resource council.

Future Talent

Wenshu devotes her time to supporting emerging talent.  She was featured on a Technology Emerging Careers Panel where she shared her expertise on Data Analytics and Visualization with a large group of emerging talent and young professionals.

Employee led Business Resource Councils

Wenshu co-lead the first ever Women in Leadership and Women in Technology Data Science Hack-A-Thon which was highly attended and led to Northern Trust's Women in Leadership (WIL) Business Resource Council (BRC) being nationally recognized by the Diversity Impact Awards.  The former President of the WIL BRC said, the "Women In Leadership Hack-A-Thon was a critical, immersive experience for IT and non-IT employees to understand and utilize data science to solve everyday business problems.  It was a brilliant way to facilitate collaboration and foster relationships while driving interest in user-enabled data technologies, building data analytics skills, and empowering data-based decisions."

Wenshu is an individual who has an unwavering passion for personal and professional development.

While initially joining Northern Trust as an auditor, Wenshu foresaw the criticality that data would play in the role of an organization and pivoted her career to one that was data focused. To make this transition, much of her experience came from proactively seeking out her own learning opportunities.  Her combination of audit acumen and analytics enabled the firm to further the use of analytics in audit. She used her foundation in audit to transition to vital role in maturing Technology’s analytics capabilities.

Wenshu consistently delivers beyond her day-to-day responsibilities.  She is able to execute on multiple projects and priorities with skill and grace.  She is a dedicated and diligent leader who goes leaps and bounds beyond expectations to assist colleagues. Wenshu epitomizes what a talented, passionate, dedicated, committed and responsible leader should be.

She’s also a 2023 BuiltIn Moxie Award winner!

 

Shagun Singh, Team Lead, Service Delivery - Client Facing Applications

Shagun has extremely strong technical skills. She understands the whole tech stack that she works with; in many cases as well or better than the development team she is working with. Because of this, she is often in a position to point people in the right direction when we have issues that need to be addressed quickly. 

According to the team that nominated her, Shagun is calm and cool. She speaks up and challenges the status quo to move innovation forward.

She does this in a constructive way and she has earned the respect of the people she works with across the enterprise. If she speaks up, people listen. She has established herself as an expert.

Client comes first

Shagun is first and foremost always thinking of the client, and as a Team Lead in Service Delivery, this is a crucial asset. The nature of production support is such that the hours are long; the work can be complicated and usually involves more than just her team.  Her energy and stamina is contagious to others. She is always “on” and has a passion for resolving the issues to make the client experience better.

“Shagun is one of the most knowledgeable partners in the private passport team. Not only she is very hard working, she is also very approachable and always ready to help any team members. She provides very helpful insights when triaging production issues, very proactive in communicating changes/impact to Clients and has great relationship with other support teams which help in solving critical issues in timely manner. She has provided valuable support to rollout key money movement and aggregation initiatives from both I Move Money and Everest teams throughout the year.” – Narendra Lohar, Director - Wealth Management Technology

Role Model

Many of the members of Shagun’s team are new in their careers and are building the experience needed to think proactively and to understand the needs and nuances of the business. Shagun devotes her time to coaching and developing the team to hone their skills. She spends time each day working through incidents with her team so they can learn and contribute.  She sets an excellent example of what an exceptional Service Delivery team member should look like.

“When I look across my organization at the talent, I see Shagun as the future of Wealth Management Technology.  Her expertise, diligence, interpersonal skills, intelligence, and her sense of ownership have already proven her a leader.  I am looking for new projects to put her on, to keep her challenged, to give her an opportunity to learn new things and to expand her positive impact on the business.  She embodies the skills and talent that we will need at the highest levels to lead us in the future.” Lucino Sotelo, Chief Digital Officer - Wealth Management Digital Services

 

Katie Connor, Portfolio Architect, Wealth Management Digital Services

Promotions a plenty

Katie Connor joined Northern Trust in January 2020. In her time with us, she has been a Senior Product Manager, interim lead for the Private Passport Product Team, was promoted to Senior Platform Product Strategist, and most recently has been promoted to Digital Services Business Architect. She has consistently looked to push our digital transformation forward at speed and scale.

Mentorship

Katie consistently mentors other female partners (which is what we call employees) in Digital Services through sharing her deep subject matter expertise and demonstrating a commitment to excellence in all she does. She serves as a "go to" day in and day out. She consistently looks to provide a wide range of growth opportunities for others on her team.

Katie is a true subject matter expert in her role as Business Architect. She actively and independently seeks out data points and research in her daily work. She demonstrates passion through her positive, can do attitude and commitment to excellence. This was demonstrated through the way she pursued, executed and delivered cross-team roadmaps. It required significant cross-team coordination, communication, data gathering and analysis.

Projects

Katie has led several high visibility digital transformation projects at Northern Trust, including:

• Creating a Digital Capability catalog with correlating industry insights to analyze feature and capability strengths and weaknesses. Recommendations from capability insights have empowered product teams to address critical areas with proven client and employee success.

• Providing a system framework analysis across multiple domains with prioritized recommendations for product enhancements which reduced technical redundancies and created more efficient business processes.

• Creating a prioritization framework for product teams that delivered a quantitative measure of product priority and streamlined improvements in the prioritization process.

• Building out and maintaining a comprehensive, department wide roadmap stretching across 3 platforms and 23 product teams.

Good company to be in…

We congratulate all of this year’s BuiltIn Moxie Award nominees and winners, including our own.  These are the women in tech driving their organizations forward. And, we are so proud to announce and confirm that Wenshu Yang is a 2023 BuiltIn Moxie Award winner.

Careers at Northern Trust

Want to join an organization that’s pushing tech forward to serve our clients and our people? 

Come find your greater at Northern Trust. Review our open roles here.