Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer — Renewal

The engineering hour, and who gets it

Every engineering organisation in a bank lives with the same arithmetic. Part of its capacity goes on keeping established systems running, patched, compliant and connected; the rest is available for new product. Without a deliberate rule, the established systems win by default, because their demands are urgent and their failures visible, and new work gets whatever is left. Over time a bank can find it is spending most of its engineering effort standing still. The opposite failure is no better. Starve the legacy estate to fund new product and the bank accumulates operational and regulatory risk that eventually forces a remediation effort far more expensive than the maintenance it skipped.

The Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer will decide where that line sits and make the decision stick. That is executive authority, not advice. You will set how product and technology decisions are allocated across the region, including what local leaders continue to decide. You will settle what evidence decides engineering spend, capacity and controls, which in practice means building a credible view of what established systems actually consume and what retiring them would cost. Product and technology commitments continue or end on your decision; plans that pass on cost or risk with nobody owning it stop, and investment that overlooks adoption, dependencies or the bad case is declined. You will approve how issues climb and decide how often the committee sees progress, exceptions and decisions still open.

The judgement at the core of the seat is deciding where engineering capacity stops serving legacy demand, and a strong candidate has done this before and can describe the evidence that made it possible. Your knowledge of banking rests on decisions that were yours, one of them a commitment without real support that you ended before it did harm. In earlier technology work you established who paid for an exception before allowing it to run on. You stay answerable after the decision, down to the tedious job of closing out technology exceptions. The organisations behind that record each had at least $570 million in revenue, 900 people and two countries. The committee will weigh your record in regulatory remediation, digital transformation and professionalisation. It wants risk judgement at level 4, and at level 3 product delivery, governance of data and AI, and architecture at scale. You name what is still open and decide in spite of it. You will stop a commitment without first securing every country leader's agreement, and the outcome is yours for the whole 12 months.

A year of reallocating capacity

With the first ninety days complete, engineering capacity should be mapped across established systems and new work, and the rules for allocating it agreed with the committee. Around month nine, capacity should have moved under those rules, legacy system risks should have accountable owners and new product work should be funded on evidence rather than advocacy. At month 12, the region should be running a product and technology model that balances run and change deliberately, reported to the committee on a set cadence.

How you will meet the committee and its colleagues

A confidential conversation by video with the Technology Committee Chair comes first, as the opening week begins. The Audit Committee Chair, in week three, turns the conversation to how capacity choices show up in the control environment. In week five you will be in a room with heads of the main functions, and in week 7 with the board's directors. Within three working days of each stage we will set out our response in writing.