15 Big Players in Banking Technology

If you work in banking technology (or have ambitions to do so) these are people you should know. As investment banks increase their tech budgets and hire more and more people into technology functions, these are the men and women leading thousands of people or heading up new developments in financial technology.

1. R. Martin Chavez, chief information officer, Goldman Sachs

Marty Chavez has a big job at Goldman Sachs. If you take the view that Goldman is a technology company – one Lloyd Blankfein would dearly love you to have – then Chavez is among the most important people at the firm. He was handed control of the technology and strats team at Goldman two years ago, and manages 9,000 people across the two groups. He has tattoo sleeves and is considered something of a maverick within the bank, but he’s also a long-serving employee with a huge amount of experience. It is now his second stint at the bank – having initially joined in 1993, he left in 1997 to join Credit Suisse and then departed the bank to found his own firm, Kiodex, in 2000. By 2005, he was back at Goldman Sachs as head of strats. He’s also been co-chief operating officer for Goldman’s equities division.

2. Mark Ashton-Rigby, chief information officer, Barclays

Mark Ashton-Rigby is on his third job in four years. For a man who spent 13 years prior to 2013 at various roles at Deutsche Bank, this is something of a departure. Ashton-Rigby moved to Barclays as its London-based CIO in May, following around three years leading technology for J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank in New York. Despite the cost-cutting at Barclays, the bank said its tech was “resilient and cost-effective” at the time of Ashton-Rigby’s appointment. Instead, he needs to use IT to give Barclays a “competitive advantage”. This is a big job.

3. Mike Grimaldi, chief information officer, corporate and investment bank, Deutsche Bank

Grimaldi, together with a gradually compiled line-up of ex-Goldman Sachs technologists, is quietly making things happen at Deutsche Bank. It is revamping its risk and pricing system across the corporate and investment bank, giving Deutsche Bank the opportunity to emulate Goldman’s SecDB, which underpins all of its trading technology. Grimaldi and Richard Shannon, who joined as CIO for the Americas after a 20-year stint at Goldman Sachs, came aboard in 2014, and have been instrumental in shaking up the technology within the investment bank since.

4. Abid Zaidi, co-head of front office technology at Royal Bank of Scotland

OK, so heading up technology for RBS may not be the job it once was at it scales back its investment bank. Nonetheless, Zaidi only recently moved up to oversee front office technology and head up IT for RBS’s corporate and investment bank in July. Before this, he was head of fixed income technology, a role he moved into after spending seven months as a consultant to RBS. Zaidi spent nearly 12 years as head of eTrading technology at Lehman Brothers until November 2008.

5. Bridget O’Connor, CIO global banking and markets, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has been shuffling the senior ranks in technology over the past few months. Latterly, its chief technology officer for fixed income, Bob Hillier, moved into home renovation. O’Connor moved into her current role in 2015, having previously lead technology for Bank of America’s consumer bank for over five years. She is nicknamed Gadget by her family, due to her tendency to take everything apart and reassemble it. She spent over 17 years working for Lehman Brothers, latterly as its CIO.

6. Bjarne Stroustrup, managing director, foundational software, Morgan Stanley

Stroustrup is the original developer of programming language C++, which has long been used in financial services tech teams. He joined Morgan Stanley in January 2014 as a managing director – his first job in the financial sector. Up until this point, Stroustrup had occupied senior roles at AT&T, as well as various professorships at universities including Princeton, Cambridge and Texas A&M. In addition to his role at Morgan Stanley, he’s a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and an honorary professor at Aarhus University. He said he joined Morgan Stanley to get back to solving “real world problems”.

7. Lori Beer, chief information officer, corporate and investment bank, J.P. Morgan

Beer has stepped into the shoes of Ashton-Rigby to head up J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment banking technology division. She heads up around 10,000 tech staff at J.P. Morgan. Beer only joined J.P. Morgan in 2014, and was previously working for health insurance firm Wellpoint. J.P. Morgan is making huge investments into its technology function and hiring across all business areas.

8. Mario Shamtani, global head of rates and currencies technology, Citi

Shamtani has been working at Citi for the past six years, but has a long history of working on fixed income technology. Before joining Citi, he was head of fixed income exotics IT at Barclays and also worked as global head of FX options technology at Lehman Brothers.

9. Oliver Bussmann, founder, Bussmann Advisory

Oliver Bussman left his role as group chief information officer at UBS earlier this year after three years in the role. He joined the bank from SAP, but has also held senior roles at Deutsche Bank and Allianz. Bussmann has been heavily involved with various fintech start-up initiatives, but is now turning his attention to consulting on issues like digital transformation, innovation and business model re-creation, rather than moving into another CIO role.

10. Mike Dargan, group chief information officer, UBS

Bussmann is credited with revolutionising technology at UBS, so Dagan has some big shoes to fill. He moved from Standard Chartered in Singapore, where he was CIO for the corporate and investment bank, to UBS’s head office in Singapore. He has experience across wealth management and the markets business at Standard Chartered and – more interestingly – moved into tech from a front office job. He worked as a managing director and head of corporate strategy and M&A for EMEA and PacRim at Merrill Lynch until 2009.

11. Cheryl Newton, operations technology, J.P. Morgan

Newton is a managing director at J.P. Morgan who moved to its Bournemouth, UK office in July this year following a six-year stint at Lloyds Banking Group. She took a career break in 2009 to care for her 16-year-old son who needed major surgery after a sporting injury, but at that time was a managing director at Barclays Capital. She’s also worked at Credit Suisse, where she was global head of IT portfolio management.

12. John D’Onofrio, chief technology officer, Citi

D’Onofrio is a lifer at Citigroup – he’s worked there for the past 32 years in various technology roles. Latterly, he’s been chief technology officer, but he also heads up Citi’s data team, which is central to most banks’ technology strategy now. He also has experience heading up technology for Citi’s corporate bank and its capital markets division.

13. Darryl West, chief information officer, HSBC

West was brought into HSBC from Barclays last year, and he has a reputation for shaking things up. At the time, an internal memo said that West’s aim was to turn technology into a “flexible function with strong commercial awareness”. West oversees thousands of technologists at HSBC across the globe.

14. Kim Hammonds, chief operating officer, Deutsche Bank

Earlier this year, Hammonds was promoted to COO from her previous role of global CIO and co-head of technology operations. Hammonds has spent most of her career working in industry – latterly as CIO at Boeing. If Grimaldi is focused on innovation, Hammond’s strength is ‘efficiencies’. She’s currently in the midst of a huge simplification programme at Deutsche: “We are streamlining and standardising. There will be a more simplified structure including cloud technology. We not only want to cut costs, but our goal is also to reduce complexity and risk,” she said in a recent interview.

15. Usman Khan, chief technology officer, Algomi

Algomi is making waves in the corporate bond market, and Khan is the man leading the technology. A co-founder at the firm, Khan spent years working in e-business solutions roles at UBS, but left in 2009 to provide consulting advice to a number fintech firms.

(Contributing Source: news.efinancialcareers.com)